Robots and racism : examining racial bias towards robots.

Abstract

Previous studies indicate that using the ‘shooter bias’ paradigm, people demon- strate a similar racial bias toward robots racialised as Black over robots racialised as White as they do toward humans of similar skin tones (Bartneck et al., 2018). However, such an effect could be argued to be the result of social priming. The question can also be raised of how people might respond to robots that are in the middle of the colour spectrum (i.e., brown) and whether such effects are moderated by the perceived anthropomorphism of the robots. Two experiments were conducted to examine whether shooter bias tendencies shown towards robots is driven by social priming, and whether diversification of robot colour and level of anthropomorphism influenced shooter bias. The results suggest that shooter bias is not influenced by social priming, and in- terestingly, introducing a new colour of robot removed shooter bias tendencies entirely. Contrary to expectations, the three types of robot were not perceived by the participants as having different levels of anthropomorphism. However, there were consistent differences across the three types in terms of participants’ response times.