Understanding Cultural Preferences for Social Robots

Oliver Korn,Neziha Akalin,Ruben Gouveia

doi:10.1145/3439717

Abstract

This article presents a study of cultural differences affecting the acceptance and design preferences of social robots. Based on a survey with 794 participants from Germany and the three Arab countries of Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, we discuss how culture influences the preferences for certain attributes. We look at social roles, abilities and appearance, emotional awareness and interactivity of social robots, as well as the attitude toward automation. Preferences were found to differ not only across cultures, but also within countries with similar cultural backgrounds. Our findings also show a nuanced picture of the impact of previously identified culturally variable factors, such as attitudes toward traditions and innovations. While the participants’ perspectives toward traditions and innovations varied, these factors did not fully account for the cultural variations in their perceptions of social robots. In conclusion, we believe that more real-life practices emerging from the situated use of robots should be investigated. Besides focusing on the impact of broader cultural values such as those associated with religion and traditions, future studies should examine how users interact, or avoid interaction, with robots within specific contexts of use.

Highlights

Robots have been tools used primarily in factories
We present a cross-cultural study investigating the impact of cultural background on the perception of social robots within two different frames: intercultural (German and Arab) as well as intracultural
While previous cross-cultural research on social robotics has mostly focused on Western samples versus Eastern samples, this study considers intracultural and intercultural analyses

Summary

Introduction

With the emergence of “cobots,” they started to work collaboratively with humans but still remained in factory settings. More and more robots have been designed explicitly to interact socially with humans (e.g. as seen in Figure 1) in everyday life [39]: Robots have been introduced as caregivers [37], tutors [19], housekeepers [10], and even intimate partners [40].

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Conclusion