Questioning Wizard of Oz: Effects of Revealing the Wizard behind the Robot

Wizard of Oz, a very commonly employed technique in human-robot interaction, faces the criticism of being deceptive as the humans interacting with the robot are told, if at all, only at the end of their interaction that there was in fact a human behind the robot. What if the robot reveals the wizard behind itself very early in the interaction? We built a deep wizard of Oz setup to allow for a robot to play together with a human against a computer AI in the context of Connect 4 game. This cooperative game interaction against a common opponent is then followed by a conversation between the human and the robot. We conducted an exploratory user study with 29 adults with three conditions where the robot reveals the wizard, lies about the wizard, and does not say anything, respectively. We also split the data based on how the participants perceive the robot in terms of autonomy. Using different metrics, we evaluate how the users interact with and perceive the robot in both the experimental and perceived conditions. We find that while there is indeed a significant difference in the participants willingness to follow robots suggestions between the experimental conditions as well as in the effort they put to prove themselves as humans (reverse Turing test), there isn’t any significant difference in their robot perception. Additionally, how humans perceive whether the robot is tele-operated or autonomous seems to be indifferent to the robot revealing its identity, i.e., the pre-conceived notions may be uninfluenced even if the robot explicitly states otherwise. Lastly, interestingly in the perception based conditions, absence of statistical significance may suggest that, in certain contexts, wizard of oz may not require hiding the wizard after all.