The personality of anthropomorphism: How the need for cognition and the need for closure define attitudes and anthropomorphic attributions toward robots

Abstract

Anthropomorphism describes the tendency to attribute human characteristics to non-human agents such as robots. These attributions could depend on some dispositional factors such as the individuals' will to engage in reflective processes (need for cognition), to predict their environment (need for closure). Indeed, these traits may moderate how we explain artificial agents’ behavior that is our motivation to use cognitively more effortful reasoning about artificial agents against easily accessible anthropomorphic explanations. In the present study, we measured participants (n = 1141) need for cognition and closure in order to predict attitudes toward robots and anthropomorphic attributions on various robots which differed in terms of human-like characteristics. We found that both dimensions of personality influenced attitudes and anthropomorphism. In addition, these effects were emphasized by the human-like characteristics of the robots. In addition, we used a novel approach of clustering and machine-learning validation to delineate personality profiles based on the need for cognition and need for closure as most predictive variables to provide a first predictive categorization of tendency to anthropomorphize and attitudes toward robots. Our results argue for the importance of considering the interaction between the dispositional traits on the one hand and the design of robots on the other for anthropomorphism.