Abstract
The present research investigated the effects of a diversity training intervention on robot-related attitudes to test whether this could help to manage the diversity inherent in hybrid human-robot teams in the work context. Previous research in the human-human context has shown that stereotypes and prejudice, i.e., negative attitudes, may impair productivity and job satisfaction in teams high in diversity (e.g., regarding age, gender, or ethnicity). Relatedly, in hybrid human-robot teams, robots likely represent an “outgroup” to their human co-workers. The latter may have stereotypes towards robots and may hold negative attitudes towards them. Both aspects might have detrimental effects on subjective and objective performance in human-robot interactions (HRI). In an experiment, we tested the effect of an economic and easy to apply diversity training intervention for use in the work context: The so-called enlightenment approach. This approach utilizes perspective-taking to reduce prejudice and discrimination in human-human contexts. We adapted this intervention to the HRI context and explored its impact on participants’ implicit and explicit robot-related attitudes. However, contrary to our predictions, taking the perspective of a robot resulted in more negative robot-related attitudes, whereas actively suppressing stereotypes about social robots and their characteristics produced positive effects on robot attitudes. Therefore, we recommend considering potential pre-existing aversions against taking the perspective of a robot when designing interventions to improve human-robot collaboration at the workplace. Instead, it might be useful to provide information about existing stereotypes and their consequences, thereby making people aware of their potential biases against social robots.
Highlights
Even though we are confronted with diversity in all sectors of our daily lives, we mostly have not considered robots as a new social group that potentially extends the notion of diversity (Ferrari and Eyssel, 2006)
We were interested in the effects of diversity training with a robot, of taking the perspective of a robot, on explicit and implicit robot attitudes, robot anxiety, and anthropomorphism
We predicted that participants would report more positive explicit and implicit negative robot attitudes, and would attribute more mind to robots if they a) took the perspective of a robot compared to participants who Cronbach’s Alpha T1
Summary
Even though we are confronted with diversity in all sectors of our daily lives, we mostly have not considered robots as a new social group that potentially extends the notion of diversity (Ferrari and Eyssel, 2006). Endorsing stereotypes and prejudice associated with groups other than our own, pose psychological obstacles to positive interactions. Diversity plays out at the workplace as well: People from different age, gender, and cultural groups work together on a daily basis. Pre-existing stereotypes associated with, for instance, age, gender, or ethnicity may hinder mixed teams from unfolding their full potential (e.g., Bezrukova et al, 2009; Ely et al, 2012). And beyond the obvious benefits of diversity management for the stereotyped group, members of the nonstereotyped majority group benefit from strategies to manage diversity, e.g., by having a higher job satisfaction (Jansen et al, 2016). A company benefits from diversity management by positively impacting its stock market value (Wright et al, 1995), and the affective commitment of its employees (Ashikali and Groeneveld, 2015)
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