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.

Recent research has shown that anthropomorphism represents a means to facilitate HRI. Under which conditions do people anthropomorphize robots and other nonhuman agents? This research question was investigated in an experiment that manipulated participants' anticipation of a prospective humanrobot interaction (HRI) with a robot whose behavior was characterized by either low or high predictability. We examined effects of these factors on perceptions of anthropomorphism and acceptance of the robot. Innovatively, the present research demonstrates that anticipation of HRI with an unpredictable agent increased anthropomorphic inferences and acceptance of the robot. Implications for future research on psychological determinants of anthropomorphism are discussed.

Is it possible to reduce intergroup bias by simply asking people to imagine having positive contact with an out-group member? This question constitutes the core idea of imagined intergroup contact-the mental simulation of a social interaction with one or more members of a social out-group (Crisp & Turner, 2009). Recent findings have documented the positive effects of this novel paradigm on explicit and implicit outgroup attitudes

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In an experiment, we tested whether the gender typicality of a human-robot interaction (HRI) task would affect the users' performance during HRI and the users' evaluation, acceptance and anthropomorphism of the robot. N = 73 participants (38 females and 35 males) performed either a stereotypically male or a stereotypically female task while being instructed by either a 'male' or a 'female' robot. Results revealed that gender typicality of the task significantly affected our dependent measures: More errors occurred when participants collaborated with the robot in the context of a stereotypically female work domain. Moreover, when participants performed a typically female task with the robot they were less willing to accept help from the robot in a future task and they anthropomorphized the robot to a lower extent. These effects were independent of robot and participant gender. Our findings demonstrate that the gender typicality of HRI tasks substantially influences HRI as well as humans' perceptions and acceptance of a robot.