Robots at work: People prefer-and forgive-service robots with perceived feelings.

By Kai Chi Yam, Yochanan E. Bigman, P. Tang, R. Ilies, David de Cremer, Harold Soh, Kurt Gray. Journal of Applied Psychology, 2020

299 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Organizations are increasingly relying on service robots to improve efficiency, but these robots often make mistakes, which can aggravate customers and negatively affect organizations. How can organizations mitigate the frontline impact of these robotic blunders? Drawing from theories of anthropomorphism and mind perception, we propose that people evaluate service robots more positively when they are anthropomorphized and seem more humanlike-capable of both agency (the ability to think) and experience (the ability to feel). We further propose that in the face of robot service failures, increased perceptions of experience should attenuate the negative effects of service failures, whereas increased perceptions of agency should amplify the negative effects of service failures on customer satisfaction. In a field study conducted in the world's first robot-staffed hotel (Study 1), we find that anthropomorphism generally leads to higher customer satisfaction and that perceived experience, but not agency, mediates this effect. Perceived experience (but not agency) also interacts with robot service failures to predict customer satisfaction such that high levels of perceived experience attenuate the negative impacts of service failures on customer satisfaction. We replicate these results in a lab experiment with a service robot (Study 2). Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/459c85a2dc5c0acfe89f0bb7daa9ff366d1ce8aa

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Nora Anders
2. Priska Linda Breves
3. Jan-Philipp Stein

Citations in the corpus

• Parasocial interactions with real and virtual influencers: The role of perceived similarity and human-likeness (2022, background): “In turn, these reduced attributions of mental prowess seem to affect how people approach the respective entities (e.g., Waytz et al., 2010; Yam et al., 2021), for instance resulting in less empathy and adapted moral expectations.”