Research and technological developments aim at enhancing artificial autonomous devices with social skills and social intelligence, thereby creating social robots that are able to interact with humans. The socio-economic and socio-cultural implications of this development are yet unknown.

The integrative social robotics (INSOR) project aims at developing and evaluating foundations and applications for social robots. INSOR is funded by a Semper Ardens Grant of the Carlsberg Foundation projects (project leader: Prof. Johanna Seibt, University of Aarhus, Denmark).An international and interdisciplinary project group of 25 researcher work in ten sub-projects.

The department of Labor Science and Organization (Sabine Koeszegi and Michael Filzmoser) partipates in the sub-project "Fair proxy mediation". Aim of the project is to investigate if social robots are perceived as fair mediators in negotiation and conflict situations. Social robots are simulated by remotely-operated telenoids in one of four experimental settings, the others are no mediation, human mediation and e-mediation. For the experiments we developed the experimental design, the negotiation case and adapted the e-mediation expert system VienNA to the requirements of the study.

INSOR project homepage, opens an external URL in a new window, Research Unit for Robophilosophy, University of Aarhus