Hello there, I have recently conducted some additional research unrelated to my PhD in a college engagement session hosted by the department, with my fellow researcher Christianna Petrichou. She is also completing her PhD research at the University, focusing on Artificial Intelligence, Morality and human perceptions of AI.
We hosted a session where students could participate in board games both independently and with a Wizard-of-Oz style authority facilitating the game. The students would each play Monopoly, Cluedo in French to present an additional level of challenge they had to figure out how to play as a group, and the social deduction game Werewolf hosted by a telepresence robot, the students believed that the robot was independently running the game for them, when in reality it was run by a third party taking cues from myself and what they could see through the camera.
The goal of the research for me was to see which games the participants found the most enjoyable based on the level of challenge they faced, and if they performed better at the tasks I had chosen to use in my main research after or before completing the games, so that I could validate the effectiveness of my research tools in a pseudo pilot-test.
Christianna was aiming to understand if the students would follow the instructions of the telepresence robot, while believing it to be a completely independent authority figure or if they would ignore it as well as their opinions on robots. Participants were informed at the end of the session that the robot was not independent for ethical reasons.
We have successfully gathered all of our data, and will be reviewing it and looking to write it up in the near future, if we find anything significant of note or publish our research somewhere, I will update this post with a link to find it.