Working with robots can make humans put in less effort

People tend to cut corners and allow trusted colleagues to pick up the slack when working as a team, in a phenomenon known as social loafing. Now researchers have found that the same thing happens when humans work with robots. Dietlind Helene Cymek at the Technical University of Berlin in Germany and her colleagues designed an experiment to test whether humans would put in less effort when they think that their personal contribution to a task won't be noticed.