How Do People Accept Robot in Public Space? A Cross-Cultural Study in Germany and Japan
For robot designers and HRI researchers, this work highlights the need for culturally adaptive robot design by revealing cross-cultural differences in cognitive and emotional drivers of public robot acceptance.
This study investigates cultural differences in incidental bystanders' acceptance of autonomous cleaning robots in public spaces, finding that Germans show significantly higher acceptance than Japanese, with Social Norms and Trust as the strongest predictors across cultures, while Germans exhibit a functional-affective pattern and Japanese a trust-emotion pattern.
With the increasing deployment of robots in public spaces, encounters between robots and incidentally copresent persons (InCoPs) are becoming more frequent. However, InCoPs remain largely underexplored in the literature, particularly from a cross-cultural perspective. Therefore, the present study investigates cultural differences in InCoPs' existence acceptance (EA) of autonomous cleaning robots in public spaces among Japanese and German participants. Online survey results revealed that Germans showed significantly higher EA. Social Norms and Trust were the strongest positive EA predictors across cultures. More specifically, for Germans, EA was directly influenced by Usefulness, Interest and Anger, showing a functional-affective pattern where functional perceptions boost EA and anger suppresses it. For Japanese participants, Trust, Surprise and Fear were the direct associational factors, forming a trust-emotion pattern. These findings reveal cultural influences on cognitive and emotional drivers of public robot acceptance, emphasizing the need for culturally adaptive robot design.