Skip to main content
Back to KTH start page

Charlotte Stinkeste

Profile picture of Charlotte Stinkeste

Doctoral student

Details

Unit address
Lindstedtsvägen 24

Researcher

Researcher ID

About me

I am a third-year PhD student at the Division of Speech, Music and Hearing (TMH). My thesis project investigates the following question: How Agency and Anthropomorphism in Human-Centered AI Affects Social Decision Making?

This research lies at the intersection ofSocial Robotics, Behavioral Economics, andPsychology. I explore how conversational agents (e.g., chatbots, social robots, and voice assistants) influence human behavior and interaction, both with these technologies and with others around us. Specifically, I investigate the effects of anthropomorphic cues on decision-making. This includes questioning the common assumption that such technologies should default to human-like design.Should robots look and sound like humans? Should chatbots use expressions like “I think”? By critically examining these questions, my work aims to inform more thoughtful and evidence-based design choices for human-technology interaction.

To explore these questions, I draw on methodologies from behavioral economics and psychology, combining behavioral experiments with self-reported measures. I examine how interactions with social AI systems influence human decisions and values (e.g., honesty, fairness, and altruism). Ultimately, my goal is to understand what makes these interactions more meaningful, trustworthy, and enduring.

I am supervised by Gabriel Skantze (KTH), Anna Dreber Almenberg (Stockholm School of Economics) and Jonas Olofsson (Stockholm University).

Master Thesis/Degree Project Supervision

If you are interested in writing a master's thesis on a topic related to my project, don't hesitate to contact me; I'd be happy to hear about it!

Former students:

  • Albin Wikström Kempe (KTH, 2024-2025) - "Good Robot, Bad Robot: Investigating The Impact of Social Robot Politeness on Human Risk-Taking in Economic Games"
  • Malin Vestin (Stockholm University, 2023-2024) - "Exploring Anthropomorphism in AI-Driven Chatbots and its Impact on Human Trust and Social Cooperation"

Interests:

  • Social agents: Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Human-AI Interaction (HAII), conversational AI, social robotics, voice assistants & speech interfaces, chatbots & dialogue systems
  • Psychological & economic behavior: decision-making in social contexts, moral, ethics, fairness, honesty, trust, social influence and persuasion, reciprocity, etc.
  • Design of agents: anthropomorphism and agency Communication & behavior: nonverbal communication, linguistic framing, prosody and voice design, human-like expressiveness, perceived empathy
  • Methodological & technical interests: LLMs, experimental design, A/B testing, behavioral data collection & analysis, robot programming for social interaction, wizard-of-oz prototyping

Example of topics/research questions:

  • The role of anthropomorphic language in chatbot: Does use human-like expressions (e.g., “I think,” “I feel”) changes human behavior in human-chatbot interactions?
  • The role of the face: Does facial expression matter in human-robot interactions? (e.g., the latest tesla robots)
  • Moral decision-making in robots: should robots be "fair"?: How do people respond when robots make fair vs. self-serving decisions in economic games?
  • Effects of human-like voices on perceptions of robots: Do robots with human-like prosody (intonation, pitch variation) appear more honest or competent? Does that change human behavior (trust, disclosure tendencies, etc.)?
  • “I trust you because you hesitate”: the impact of verbal cues in AI dialogue
  • Do simulating fillers and other cognitive cues (e.g., hesitation, delays, “let me think...”) increase perceived intelligence and trust?
  • Social framing in AI: can a robot encourage ethical choices? How does a robot’s framing of choices (e.g., using fairness vs. efficiency arguments) influence user decisions?

Background

I hold a background in computer sciences (B.A.) and cognitive sciences;(B.A., M.S.) from the University of Lille (France), where I previously explored the neural correlates of prediction in spoken language comprehension. After my master's degree (Sep 2021), I received an outward mobility grant from the graduate program "Information and Knowledge Society" issued by the Foundation I-SITE, which allowed me to spend two months at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen (Netherlands). During this mobility, I had the opportunity to join the Neurobiology of Language research team, led by Professor Peter Hagoort. I was able to work on a research project led by Dr. Eleanor Huizeling, aiming to combine electroencephalography (EEG), virtual reality, and eye-tracking to study speech prediction mechanisms in ecologically valid virtual environments. I then went back to France, where I worked as a research engineer for the ANR-funded ReaDY-SPOK project under the supervision of Pr. Angèle Brunellière and Dr. Gary Boddaert, focusing on the dynamics of spoken communication in social interactions.


Courses

Multimodal Interaction and Interfaces (DT2140), assistant

Project in Conversational Systems (DT2151), assistant