Are artificial team-mates scapegoats in computer games

Abstract

In cooperative games that involve team-mates that are controlled by either a computer or another human player, is there a difference in how humans assign credit or blame? There has been some related work on computers as team-mates and credit/blame assignment, but there does not seem to have been work to show whether the belief that a team-mate is human or not affects this. A qualitative study was conducted, in which 16 participants played variations of a team-based game with one of four kinds of team-mates: human (real or perceived) or AI (real or perceived). The two main findings of this research are that the perception of whether a team-mate is human or computer results in different credit/blame assignment and results in inaccurate skill assessment. Copyright 2011 ACM.