Alexandre S. Pires | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

Cooperation Through Indirect Reciprocity in Child-Robot Interactions

Social interactions increasingly involve artificial agents, such as conversational or collaborative bots. Understanding trust and prosociality in these settings is fundamental to improve human-AI teamwork. Research in biology and social sciences has identified mechanisms to sustain cooperation among humans. Indirect reciprocity (IR) is one of them. With IR, helping someone can enhance an individual's reputation, nudging others to reciprocate in the future. Transposing IR to human-AI interactions is however challenging, as differences in human demographics, moral judgements, and agents' learning dynamics can affect how interactions are assessed. To study IR in human-AI groups, we combine laboratory experiments and theoretical modelling. We investigate whether 1) indirect reciprocity can be transposed to children-robot interactions; 2) artificial agents can learn to cooperate given children's strategies; and 3) how differences in learning algorithms impact human-AI cooperation. We find that IR extends to children and robots solving coordination dilemmas. Furthermore, we observe that the strategies revealed by children provide a sufficient signal for multi-armed bandit algorithms to learn cooperative actions. Beyond the experimental scenarios, we observe that cooperating through multi-armed bandit algorithms is highly dependent on the strategies revealed by humans.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

How large language models judge and influence human cooperation

Humans increasingly rely on large language models (LLMs) to support decisions in social settings. Previous work suggests that such tools shape people's moral and political judgements. However, the long-term implications of LLM-based social decision-making remain unknown. How will human cooperation be affected when the assessment of social interactions relies on language models? This is a pressing question, as human cooperation is often driven by indirect reciprocity, reputations, and the capacity to judge interactions of others. Here, we assess how state-of-the-art LLMs judge cooperative actions. We provide 21 different LLMs with an extensive set of examples where individuals cooperate -- or refuse cooperating -- in a range of social contexts, and ask how these interactions should be judged. Furthermore, through an evolutionary game-theoretical model, we evaluate cooperation dynamics in populations where the extracted LLM-driven judgements prevail, assessing the long-term impact of LLMs on human prosociality. We observe a remarkable agreement in evaluating cooperation against good opponents. On the other hand, we notice within- and between-model variance when judging cooperation with ill-reputed individuals. We show that the differences revealed between models can significantly impact the prevalence of cooperation. Finally, we test prompts to steer LLM norms, showing that such interventions can shape LLM judgements, particularly through goal-oriented prompts. Our research connects LLM-based advices and long-term social dynamics, and highlights the need to carefully align LLM norms in order to preserve human cooperation.

physics.soc-ph↗