"It don't matter if you're black or white"? Effects of robot appearance and user prejudice on evaluations of a newly developed robot companion

Abstract

Previous work shows that other people are evaluated more positively when they are perceived as part of the evaluator's ingroup. This phenomenon - ingroup bias - has been robustly documented in social psychological intergroup research. To test this effect to the domain of social robots, we conducted an experiment with 61 Caucasian (White) American participants who rated either a robot that resembled the participants' Caucasian ingroup or a social outgroup on mind perception (i.e., the attribution of agency and experience). First, we predicted that the ingroup robot would be evaluated more positively than the outgroup robot. Moreover, we assessed the Caucasian Americans' endorsement of anti-Black prejudice. Thus, second, we hypothesized interaction effects of robot type and level of prejudice on mind perception, meaning that effects of ingroup bias should be particularly pronounced under high (vs. low) levels of self-reported Anti- Black prejudice. Interestingly, we did not obtain main effects for robot type on mind perception. Contrary to our hypothesis, participants even seemed to attribute more agency and experience to the outgroup robot relative to the ingroup robot. As expected, no main effects for levels of prejudice on mind perception emerged. Importantly, however, we obtained the predicted interaction effects on the central dependent measures. Obviously, the interplay of design choices and user attitudes may bias anthropomorphic inferences about robot companions, posing a psychological barrier to human-robot companionship and pleasant human-robot interaction. © Springer International Publishing 2013.