In research investigating human interaction with non-human (and in particular artificial) agents, much attention has been paid to what kind of agent the human is interacting with and to what extent (or in what way) it is human-like (e.g., Lagerstedt and Thill, 2020). However, although this strategy can often be quite useful and informative, it is also overgeneralises an overly simplified view on human-human interaction. The way humans interact with other humans depend largely on what role (in the sense of Goffman, 1959) the other human is inhabiting at that particular instance, as well as the context in which the interaction happens. This phenomenon is particularly forgotten in many discussions related to human interaction with social robots (Healey et al., 2023). There are, however, situations where this phenomenon can explain behaviours that would otherwise be quite strange. For example, in a study where humans were interacting with a virtual assistant (Alexa) in domestic situations (Vanzan et al., 2025), there were several instances when humans were speaking to the Alexa and, mid interaction, made remarks about the Alexa to each other as if the Alexa was not there. We call this “the Butler Effect” to emphasise how such otherwise rude behaviour would not be unreasonable under the right circumstances of human-human interaction. For instance, when dinner guests interact with serving staff, the presence of the staff might only be acknowledged when their roles are relevant for the guests. Framing the phenomenon in terms of interactions between roles should help reduce the excessive exotification of non-human agents, and better access the underlying psychological and cognitive dynamics at hand. This perspective can help reintroduce and handle some of the complexities of the interactions necessary for domains such as industry 4.0 and 5.0 (Kolbeinsson et al., 2019).

References:
-Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Allen Lane.
-Healey, P. G. T., Howes, C., Kempson, R., Mills, G. J., Purver, M., Gregoromichelaki, E., Eshghi, A., and Hough, J. (2023). ”who’s there?”: Depicting identity in interaction. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 46:e37.
-Kolbeinsson, A., Lagerstedt, E., and Lindblom, J. (2019). Foundation for a classification of collaboration levels for human-robot cooperation in manufacturing. Production & Manufacturing Research, 7(1):448–471.
-Lagerstedt, E. and Thill, S. (2020). Benchmarks for evaluating human-robot interaction: lessons learned from human-animal interactions. In 2020 29th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), pages 137–143. IEEE.
-Vanzan, V., Bedir, T., Maraev, V., Lagerstedt, E., Barthel, M., and Howes, C. (2025). Fart gags and prudish machines: Laughter in human-agent interactions. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction, pages 265–273.