The Doors of Social Robot Perception: The Influence of Implicit Self-theories

Type of content
Journal Article
Thesis discipline
Degree name
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Language
en
Date
2021
Authors
Allan, Dwain
Vonasch, Andrew
Bartneck, Christoph
Abstract

Understanding people’s perceptions and inferences about social robots and, thus, their responses toward them, constitutes one of the most pervasive research themes in the field of Human–Robot interaction today. We herein augment and extend this line of work by investigating, for the first time, the novel proposition that one’s implicit self-theory orientation (underlying beliefs about the malleability of self-attributes, such as one’s intelligence), can influence one’s perceptions of emerging social robots developed for everyday use. We show that those who view self-attributes as fixed (entity theorists) express greater robot anxiety than those who view self-attributes as malleable (incremental theorists). This result holds even when controlling for well-known covariate influences, like prior robot experience, media exposure to science fiction, technology commitment, and certain demographic factors. However, only marginal effects were obtained for both attitudinal and intentional robot acceptance, respectively. In addition, we show that incremental theorists respond more favorably to social robots, compared to entity theorists. Furthermore, we find evidence indicating that entity theorists exhibit more favorable responses to a social robot positioned as a servant. We conclude with a discussion about our findings.

Description
Citation
Allan DD, Vonasch AJ, Bartneck C (2021). The Doors of Social Robot Perception: The Influence of Implicit Self-theories. International Journal of Social Robotics.
Keywords
Implicit self-theories, Mindset, Human–Robot interaction, Social Robots, Robot anxiety
Ngā upoko tukutuku/Māori subject headings
ANZSRC fields of research
0801 Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing
0915 Interdisciplinary Engineering
2002 Cultural Studies
Fields of Research::46 - Information and computing sciences::4608 - Human-centred computing::460806 - Human-computer interaction
Fields of Research::46 - Information and computing sciences::4602 - Artificial intelligence::460205 - Intelligent robotics
Fields of Research::46 - Information and computing sciences::4602 - Artificial intelligence::460202 - Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
Fields of Research::52 - Psychology::5205 - Social and personality psychology::520505 - Social psychology
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All rights reserved unless otherwise stated