Study shows mean robot boss can help improve employee performance

A new study has found that replacing your nice boss with a cruel robot supervisor is relatively better for employee's performance.

According to a study published in Science Robotics, employees are most likely to perform better, improve cognitive abilities and concentrate more when they are under supervision of cruel robot instead of a nice one.

As a part of the study, 58 young adults were asked twice to finish the ‘Stroop task’ – a psychological experiment in which a person sees a word and must state the color of the font, for instance the word ‘black’ written in blue color. The first time the volunteers were required to complete it alone, whereas the second time they either completed it alone again or with a humanoid robot supervisor in the room, explained Futurism.

Study finds children are easily peer pressured by robots

Initially, the participants were made to have a conversation with the robot programmed to answer questions either positively or negatively. Later, the participants worked on the test while the robot watched them.

The results, as per NewScientist, showed that the split attention helped people paired with mean robots respond quickly, focus better and make fewer mistakes with overall notably improved performance, than those paired with friendly robots or none at all, whose performance didn’t improve at all.

“Participants will give more attention to the ‘bad’ robot because maybe it could be dangerous, maybe it could do something that you have not predicted, maybe it could be mean towards you or it judges you,” said researcher Nicolas Spatola.

However, Spatola noticed that this technique will probably not be effective in every situation, “It would be wrong and a bit dystopian to conclude that if we put a bad robot in every place everyone will perform better. Imagine a robot sitting in your office insulting you every day – it will not be good for your long-term performance.”