If you're a video game player, you certainly know that your performance gets worse every time you're being insulted by anyone. For gamers, anyone may mean both human and non-human, like a robot. Indeed, anyone playing video games tends to perform poorly when getting insults, even from a rude robot. Recently-conducted studies share this information.

Researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University did a survey and asked participants, according to "play a logic-based game with a personal assistant named Pepper," a SoftBank invention. This information was shared via an online news post from BBC News. Pepper is a kind of robot designed and developed for people. It is built to be in contact with humans, assist and share knowledge with them as they help with their business along the process. Opposite to how it seems to appear to gamers, Pepper is supposed to be friendly and engaging. It should create extraordinary experiences and develop real relationships.

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What Pepper Does

In the said logic-based games, this so-called rude robot switched between encouraging the players and giving them mild insults. As a result, the players are said to have played better when the robot stayed positive. However, the same people made less reasonable decisions with the game when the robot gave them grief. Previous studies have it that insults, in whatever form they are given and whoever is giving them, can result in the suffering of performance in any competitive environment.

Similarly, a study that came out earlier this week, for instance, found gamers who played Mario Kart more distracted every time their opponents were abusive of their language used to communicate with them. The insults of Pepper were also mildly compared with some of the gamers who were abusive during the online game. This rude robot may call the opponent "a terrible player," and this has proven to be destructive to the players. But research findings had it that players didn't manage too well in over 30 games with Pepper when they thought of its attempt to distract them by saying rude words.

Research Findings

The said research's co-author, Fei Fang noted, this particular study was among the first research to look at human interactions with robots that are uncooperative and rude. In connection to this, Fan said, they can "expect home assistants to be cooperative." However, in circumstances such as online shopping and activities, they may have different goals as humans do. Fang and her group's research paper was peer-reviewed and printed by the 28th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication.