关键词: 工作分配, 心智感知, 责任感知, 人-机协同

Abstract:

With the development of artificial intelligence technology, intelligent robots have begun to assume work entities in the workforce. As both humans and intelligent robots participate as workers, it becomes necessary to address how work should be allocated between them. To answer this question, it is essential to understand the types of tasks that humans are willing to accept being performed by intelligent robots within the social division of labor. From the mind perception theory, intelligent robots possess moderate agency and low experience. Current researches indicate that, due to differences in mind, humans and intelligent robots differ in the types of tasks they can effectively undertake. Mind disparity may influence judgments about the responsibilities that humans and intelligent robots can bear in the workplace, thereby affecting work allocation. Despite intelligent robots having lower agency and experience than humans, their significant computational and storage capabilities suggest that the integration of humans and intelligent robots represents an emerging trend (human-robot team). Additionally, in the workplace, there exist collaborative forms of human-human and robot-robot teamwork. When the work entities shift from individual to group forms, what changes occur in the mind of collaborative teams compared to individuals? How do these changes influence the responsibilities that each collaborative team can undertake and the acceptance of work allocations? This study will explore the impact of work entity types and collaborative forms on the acceptance of work allocation based on the mind perception theory.
This research comprises four behavioral experiments. Study 1 (N = 100, 43 females) and Study 2 (N = 100, 48 females) utilize contextual decision-making tasks to investigate whether individuals accept work allocations to humans or intelligent robots in scenarios involving monetary or moral outcomes. Participants are required to read the experimental scenarios (which have been validated through a pre-experiment) and understand the allocation of work tasks. They then decide whether to accept the proposed work allocation. Study 3 (N = 100, 49 females) and Study 4 (N = 100, 48 females) further examine whether collaborative teams involving multiple agents influence acceptance of work allocation. The collaborative teams consist of human-human, human-robot, and robot-robot teams, while maintaining the monetary and moral contexts established in the earlier two studies.
The main results of this study are as follows: (1) In both monetary and moral tasks, individuals are more inclined to accept the allocation of loss-related work to robots, whereas benefit-related work is preferentially assigned to humans; (2) The differentiated mind of humans and robots lead to differences in the responsibilities they can assume, ultimately resulting in the allocation of tasks with distinct gain-loss works; (3) When work agents form collaborative teams, a collective mind emerges; (4) Collaborative teams configured as human-human, human-robot, and robot-robot demonstrated a progressive decline in collective mind. Consequently, the monetary and moral responsibilities that these teams could undertake diminished in the same order, thereby shaping the allocation of monetary and moral tasks.
Based on the theory of mind perception, this research elucidates the psychological mechanisms underlying the acceptance of work allocation among different entity types and collaborative teams. These insights hold significance for clarifying the role and position of intelligent robots in the division of labor, as well as for the rational allocation of tasks between humans and intelligent robots.

Key words: work allocation, mind perception, responsibility perception, human-robot collaboration