Persuasive Robotics: The influence of robot gender on human behavior
By Mike Siegel, Cynthia Lynn Breazeal, Michael I. Norton. 2009 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2009
407 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Persuasive Robotics is the study of persuasion as it applies to human-robot interaction (HRI). Persuasion can be generally defined as an attempt to change another's beliefs or behavior. The act of influencing others is fundamental to nearly every type of social interaction. Any agent desiring to seamlessly operate in a social manner will need to incorporate this type of core human behavior. As in human interaction, myriad aspects of a humanoid robot's appearance and behavior can significantly alter its persuasiveness - this work will focus on one particular factor: gender. In the current study, run at the Museum of Science in Boston, subjects interacted with a humanoid robot whose gender was varied. After a short interaction and persuasive appeal, subjects responded to a donation request made by the robot, and subsequently completed a post-study questionnaire. Findings showed that men were more likely to donate money to the female robot, while women showed little preference. Subjects also tended to rate the robot of the opposite sex as more credible, trustworthy, and engaging. In the case of trust and engagement the effect was much stronger between male subjects and the female robot. These results demonstrate the importance of considering robot and human gender in the design of HRI.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Social Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/02ef0eb43caf29c6a997d1ae2c67419f9d59593d
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Citations in the corpus
- Sex and gender analysis improves science and engineering (2019, unknown): “…the robot 87–92 ; (2) by colour-coding the robot 93,94 ; (3) by manipulating visual indicators of gender (for example, face, hairstyle or lip colour 94,95 ); (4) by adding a male or female voice, or low or high pitch to simulate this, respectively 87–92, 94 , 96 , 97 But there are dangers here.”
- A Mass-Produced Sociable Humanoid Robot: Pepper: The First Machine of Its Kind (2018, background): “Some studies already show that a person tends to rate a robot that looks like the opposite sex as more credible, trustworthy, and engaging [9] and that, if robots exhibit a gender, there is a stereotype-based bias in the expected services the robot should be providing [10].”
- Designing persuasive robots: How robots might persuade people using vocal and nonverbal cues (2012, background): “Recent studies have explored how robots might serve as persuasive agents, focusing particularly on the role of perceived robot gender in shaping the persuasiveness of a robot [48].”
- Making Social Robots More Attractive: The Effects of Voice Pitch, Humor and Empathy (2013, result): “explained by general stereotypes which predicts men’s preference for female robots, also found by other studies [69].”