Factors Influencing the Adoption of the Intentional Stance: The Robot

In the quest for understanding the factors that contribute to the adoption of the Intentional Stance towards robots, the obvious candidate is the robot itself—its physical features and the way it behaves. This chapter explores how the characteristics of a robot may influence the propensity to adopt the Intentional Stance. It discusses factors such as robot appearance, human-like behaviours, biologically inspired kinematics, and responsiveness to environmental signals, as cues facilitating the perception of the robot as an intentional agent. Variability and temporal parameters in human-like behaviours seem to be crucial to perceive a robot as human-like. Also, the integration of biologically inspired animation principles enhances human-likeness in robot behaviours. While humanoid robots endowed with such features and behaviours improve natural interaction (and thereby, possibly evoking the adoption of the Intentional Stance), the chapter highlights the tension between enhancing anthropomorphism through human-like features and triggering fear reactions due to the Uncanny Valley effect. The chapter highlights the importance of using both implicit measures and explicit judgements for evaluating robot behaviour’s impact on human perception, due to the fact that certain brain mechanisms evoked by a robot might not reach conscious awareness and thus might not be available to explicit reports.