Social loafing: people pay less attention when working alongside robots

People are less likely to pay attention to tasks when working alongside a robot, as researchers found evidence of "social loafing" during their study. Scientists at the Technical University of Berlin, say people are more likely to take a laid back approach when having them on their team.

The term, social loafing, is where people think a colleague – or the technology – performs particularly well, or where they think their own contribution would not be appreciated, people tend to take a more laid-back approach, as they think others will cover for them.

Dietlind Helene Cymek, the first author of the study, which appears in the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI said: "Teamwork is a mixed blessing. Working together can motivate people to perform well but it can also lead to a loss of motivation because the individual contribution is not as visible. We were interested in whether we could also find such motivational effects when the team partner is a robot.”

The researchers asked a group of workers to check the quality of a series of tasks. Half the group were told the tasks had been performed by a robot, and while they did not work directly with the robot, named Panda, they had seen it and heard it operating.

The task was to check for errors on circuit boards, and their activity was monitored by the researchers who blurred out the images of the boards the workers received, only showing them an image they could check once they actively opened it.

At first, there was no statistical difference in the time of the two groups, but when researchers investigated the participants’ error rates, those working with Panda were catching fewer defects after they had seen the robot successfully correct many errors. Researchers said this could reflect a “looking but not seeing” effect, where people engage less once they feel a colleague or resource is reliable.

However, all participants thought they were paying an equivalent amount of attention, the researchers felt that subconsciously they assumed Panda had picked up defects well.

“It is easy to track where a person is looking, but much harder to tell whether that visual information is being sufficiently processed at a mental level,” said Dr Linda Onnasch, a senior author of the study.