title: Social categorization of social robots: anthropomorphism as a function of robot group membership.
abstract: Previous work on social categorization has shown that people often use cues such as a person's gender, age, or ethnicity to categorize and form impressions of others. The present research investigated effects of social category membership on the evaluation of humanoid robots. More specifically, participants rated a humanoid robot that either belonged to their in-group or to a national out-group with regard to anthropomorphism (e.g., mind attribution, warmth), psychological closeness, contact intentions, and design. We predicted that participants would show an in-group bias towards the robot that ostensibly belonged to their in-group--as indicated by its name and location of production. In line with our hypotheses, participants not only rated the in-group robot more favourably--importantly, they also anthropomorphized it more strongly than the out-group robot. Our findings thus document that people even apply social categorization processes and subsequent differential social evaluations to robots.
authors: Cluster of Excellence in Cognitive Interaction Technology, University of Bielefeld, Germany. feyssel@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de
authors: Friederike
authors: F
authors: Eyssel
authors: Dieta
authors: D
authors: Kuchenbrandt
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001290:Attitude; D002605:Character; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D005858:Germany; D006127:Group Structure; D040821:Human Characteristics; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009275:Names; D012371:Robotics; D012933:Social Identification; D014421:Turkey; D055815:Young Adult