working hand in hand with psychologists would be desirable
How are we, HRI researchers, perceived by psychologists? \(\rightarrow\) Potential lack
of recognition might make ‘hand in hand’ work difficult.
\itemweshould not be shy/overly modest: our quality standard are high
are they? how do they compare with psychology?
\itemcomeup with our own reference tasks/studies: HRI is not (only)
psychology, we do not have to ground all of our work in previous
research in social sciences.
Should we talk about the consent forms and how they restrict the design of an experiment, arguing that we should create less artificial environments for studying natural interaction
Our message is that we, as the HRI community, might have had a ‘love affair’
with psychology. We should attempt to turn it into a ‘regular business
relationship’, made of inspiration and ideas sharing, but also of critical
questioning.
The conclusion of the Science study on reproducibility in psychology \cite{rpp}
summarizes nicely the message:
Following this intensive effort to reproduce a sample of published
psychological findings, how many of the effects can we confirm are true? Zero.
And, how many of the effects can we confirm are false? Zero. Is this a
limitation of the project design? No. It is the reality of doing science,
even if it is not appreciated in daily practice.
Importantly, this is the reality of doing science in general, not only
social science. We must not blind ourselves: our methods and protocols in
HRI certainly do not shelter us from the exact same risks. Future researchers
might well write tomorrow the same kind of article about our field when they
will revisit today’s literature on Human-Robot Interaction.