Trash talking has a long and colorful history of flustering game opponents, and now researchers have demonstrated that discouraging words can be perturbing even when uttered by a robot.

The trash talk in the study was decidedly mild, with utterances such as «I have to say you are a terrible player,» and «Over the course of the game your playing has become confused.» Even so, people who played a game with the robot — a commercially available humanoid robot known as Pepper — performed worse when the robot discouraged them and better when the robot encouraged them.

Lead author Aaron M. Roth said some of the 40 study participants were technically sophisticated and fully understood that a machine was the source of their discomfort.

«One participant said, ‘I don’t like what the robot is saying, but that’s the way it was programmed so I can’t blame it,’» said Roth, who conducted the study while he was a master’s student in the CMU Robotics Institute.

But the researchers found that, overall, human performance ebbed regardless of technical sophistication.

The study, presented last month at the IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) in New Delhi, India, is a departure from typical human-robot interaction studies, which tend to focus on how humans and robots can best work together.

Story Source: Materials provided by Carnegie Mellon University. Original written by Byron Spice. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.