Cobbler Stick With Your Reads: People's Perceptions of Gendered Robots Performing Gender Stereotypical Tasks
This research addresses human-robot interaction challenges by exploring stereotyping effects, but it is incremental as it builds on prior work on robot design and gender effects.
The study investigated how robot gender and task type affect human perceptions, finding that robots performing analytical tasks are seen as more competent and trustworthy than those doing social tasks, regardless of robot gender, and observed trends of dehumanization for female robots and gender-stereotype mismatches.
Previous research found that robots should best be designed to fit their given task, whilst others identified gender effects in people's evaluations of robots. This study combines this knowledge to investigate stereotyping effects of robot genderedness and assigned tasks in an online experiment (n = 89) manipulating robot gender (male vs. female) and task type (analytical vs. social) in a between subject's design in terms of trust, social perception, and humanness. People deem robots more competent and have higher trust in their capacity when they perform analytical tasks compared to social tasks, independent of the robot's gender. Furthermore, we observed a trend in the data indicating that people seem to dehumanize female robots (regardless of task performed) to animals lacking higher-level mental processes, and additionally that people seem to dehumanize robots to emotionless objects only when gendered robots perform tasks contradicting the stereotypes of their gender.