Panel: Determining the Subjective Surplus in Social Role Performance: A Case for ISR Johanna SEIBT a,1 Malene Flensborg DAMHOLDT b ; Christina VESTERGAARD a ; Oliver QUICK c ; Catharina SMEDEGAARD a a Research Unit for Robophilosophy and Integrative Social Robotic, Aarhus University (AU), Denmark b Department of Psychology, AU 3 Department of Business Development and Technology, AU ORCiD: Johanna Seibt 0000-0003-3076-5912 Abstract. Purely functional definitions of social roles in terms of codified task structures suggest that robots may be able to perform some or all of the tasks of a social role. However, in order to determine what we will ‘gain or lose’ when using robots to perform a social role R in context C, we need to determine whether the performance of R in C (i) requires capacities traditionally associated with human ‘subjectivity’, and (ii) allows for, or requires, a ‘subjective surplus’, that is, individual variations in role performance that are possible due to the capacities of subjectivity. The 'subjective surplus' of R in C can have positive or negative effects for the performance of this role. The panel presented the approach of Integrative Social Robotics (ISR) as a method for analyzing perceptions and functions of the subjective surplus within a concrete institutional context, with special attention to subjective surplus factors that are traditionally thought to be indispensable, such as empathy, sympathy, and spontaneity (free will). Keywords. Subjectivity, ontology, sociality analysis, Integrative Social Robotics, mixed methods, anthropology, psychology, empathy, sympathy, experiential novelty 1. Introduction Social institutions have been characterized as ”the more enduring features of social life” [1: 24] or even as “complex social forms that reproduce themselves” [2]. Such persistence in time is taken to derive from “a complex of positions, roles, norms and values lodged in particular types of social structures organising relatively stable patterns of human activity” [3: 6]. The temporal robustness of institutions as self-reproducing, recurrent patterns comes into view once we view institutions in formal terms, as systems of codified roles, each defined with a certain task structure, governed by rules and conventions. Especially formal accounts of institutions lend themselves to the idea that 1 Johanna Seibt, Research Unit for Robophilosophy and Integrative Social Robotics, Aarhus University, Jens Christian Skousvej 7, 8000 Aarhus Denmak; E-mail: filseibt@cas.au.dk.