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Main Authors: Neto, Isabel, Pires, Alexandre S., Correia, Filipa, Santos, Fernando P.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20621
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author Neto, Isabel
Pires, Alexandre S.
Correia, Filipa
Santos, Fernando P.
author_facet Neto, Isabel
Pires, Alexandre S.
Correia, Filipa
Santos, Fernando P.
contents Social interactions increasingly involve artificial agents, such as conversational or collaborative bots. Understanding trust and prosociality in these settings is fundamental to improve human-AI teamwork. Research in biology and social sciences has identified mechanisms to sustain cooperation among humans. Indirect reciprocity (IR) is one of them. With IR, helping someone can enhance an individual's reputation, nudging others to reciprocate in the future. Transposing IR to human-AI interactions is however challenging, as differences in human demographics, moral judgements, and agents' learning dynamics can affect how interactions are assessed. To study IR in human-AI groups, we combine laboratory experiments and theoretical modelling. We investigate whether 1) indirect reciprocity can be transposed to children-robot interactions; 2) artificial agents can learn to cooperate given children's strategies; and 3) how differences in learning algorithms impact human-AI cooperation. We find that IR extends to children and robots solving coordination dilemmas. Furthermore, we observe that the strategies revealed by children provide a sufficient signal for multi-armed bandit algorithms to learn cooperative actions. Beyond the experimental scenarios, we observe that cooperating through multi-armed bandit algorithms is highly dependent on the strategies revealed by humans.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_20621
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cooperation Through Indirect Reciprocity in Child-Robot Interactions
Neto, Isabel
Pires, Alexandre S.
Correia, Filipa
Santos, Fernando P.
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Social interactions increasingly involve artificial agents, such as conversational or collaborative bots. Understanding trust and prosociality in these settings is fundamental to improve human-AI teamwork. Research in biology and social sciences has identified mechanisms to sustain cooperation among humans. Indirect reciprocity (IR) is one of them. With IR, helping someone can enhance an individual's reputation, nudging others to reciprocate in the future. Transposing IR to human-AI interactions is however challenging, as differences in human demographics, moral judgements, and agents' learning dynamics can affect how interactions are assessed. To study IR in human-AI groups, we combine laboratory experiments and theoretical modelling. We investigate whether 1) indirect reciprocity can be transposed to children-robot interactions; 2) artificial agents can learn to cooperate given children's strategies; and 3) how differences in learning algorithms impact human-AI cooperation. We find that IR extends to children and robots solving coordination dilemmas. Furthermore, we observe that the strategies revealed by children provide a sufficient signal for multi-armed bandit algorithms to learn cooperative actions. Beyond the experimental scenarios, we observe that cooperating through multi-armed bandit algorithms is highly dependent on the strategies revealed by humans.
title Cooperation Through Indirect Reciprocity in Child-Robot Interactions
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20621