Abstract
In the near future, the human social environment worldwide might be populated by humanoid robots. The way we perceive these new social agents could depend on basic social psychological processes such as social categorization. Recent results indicate that humans can make use of social stereotypes when faced with robots based on their characterization as “male” or “female” and a perception of their group membership. However, the question of the application of nationality-based stereotypes to robots has not yet been studied. Given that humans attribute different levels of warmth and competence (the two universal dimensions of social perception) to individuals based in part on their nationality, we hypothesized that the way robots are perceived differs depending on their country of origin. In this study, participants had to evaluate four robots differing in their anthropomorphic shape. For each participant, these robots were presented as coming from one of four different countries selected for their level of perceived warmth and competence. Each robot was evaluated on their anthropomorphic and human traits. As expected, the country of origin's warmth and competence level biased the perception of robots in terms of the attribution of social and human traits. Our findings also indicated that these effects differed according to the extent to which the robots were anthropomorphically shaped. We discuss these results in relation to the way in which social constructs are applied to robots.
Highlights
In the few years, robots will be part of our everyday lives (Fujita and Kitano, 1998; Goldberg, 2001; Lee et al, 2010; Kee, 2011)
Much effort has been devoted to increasing the acceptance of social robots by giving them more and more human features, such as a national identity and citizenship (De Graaf and Ben Allouch, 2013)
The present results show that the perceived warmth and competence of a country of origin moderates the attribution of human traits as measured by the dehumanization scale (Haslam, 2006; Haslam and Loughnan, 2014) and the robotic social attributes scale (RoSAS)
Summary
In the few years, robots will be part of our everyday lives (Fujita and Kitano, 1998; Goldberg, 2001; Lee et al, 2010; Kee, 2011). Much effort has been devoted to increasing the acceptance of social robots by giving them more and more human features, such as a national identity and citizenship (e.g., the robot Sophia, which was granted Saudi Arabian citizenship) (De Graaf and Ben Allouch, 2013). It remains unclear how attributing human social constructs such as nationality to robots impacts the way they are perceived by people in general. Previous research has shown that under certain circumstances, human social representations (including social stereotypes) are used to evaluate social robots (Siegel et al, 2009) and reduce
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