Purposeful Failures as a Form of Culturally-Appropriate Intelligent Disobedience During Human-Robot Social Interaction

Human-robot interaction (HRI) can suffer from breakdowns that are often regarded as "failures" by roboticists. Here, however, we argue that such breakdowns can be sometimes perceived as a type of defiance that signals more socially intelligent behavior rather than less, depending on the culture and linguistic environment within which they occur. We present recent research evidence supporting this viewpoint, based on HRI experiments comparing English speakers and Korean speakers. Counterintuitively, occasional culturally-appropriate forms of disobedience may in fact be a desirable design feature for social robots in the future.