Avalilação PREreview de The Bystander Effect in Human-Robot Interaction: How the Presence of Bystanders Inhibits Help for a Social Robot

This study examined the bystander effect in human-robot interaction and compared it to human-human interaction.

Concerns:

-For experiment 1, they conducted an online study rather than using more objective approaches to studying the bystander effect, like through a staged experiment in public or a lab. Since the bystander effect is very well known, a lot of the participants might already know about it and would be able to tell the true objective of the experiment despite the cover stories, leading to biased results. Expounding on this with an excerpt from the study, “We instructed the participants to imagine having to arrive on time for an experiment at a technical institute, and that while walking through the hallways of the institute, they would repeatedly encounter situations requiring a decision”, it would have been much better if the participants did not have to imagine anything and actually experienced this first hand without background knowledge.

-Gender ratio for experiment 1 is more than 2:1 females to males. This could lead to a multitude of factors pertaining to differences in gender potentially distorting the results.

-In experiment 2, they also conducted an online study. The video stimuli was an improvement to the static images, however, bias can be even more prevalent in this experiment as they also recruited students majoring in psychology.

-Gender ratio for experiment 2 is also really imbalanced, also with a ratio greater than 2:1 females to males.

Competing interests

The author declares that they have no competing interests.

Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The author declares that they did not use generative AI to come up with new ideas for their review.