How Prior Knowledge and Belief Affect our Attitude Toward the Android of “Soseki Natsume”?

Abstract

It is well known that prior knowledge and belief substantially influence our attitude toward another person in an interpersonal communication scene. Meanwhile, in many cases, we do not use confirmed prior knowledge and belief in a human-robot interaction scene, because these entities do not have commonly shared identities. Hence, it is still unclear that how prior knowledge and belief affect our attitude toward artificial robots. In this study, we investigated how prior knowledge and belief influence our attitude toward android of “Soseki Natsume” who is one of most famous novelists in Japan. As a result, we found that prior knowledge about Soseki was weakly related to the subject’s sense of reality of the android. Furthermore, we also found that the awe of artificial intelligence was strongly related to the subject’s sense of reality of the android.