A Preliminary Study of the Effects of Racialization and Humanness on the Verbal Abuse of Female-Gendered Robots

Ramos, Ana Cecilia Sánchez; Contreras, Virginia; Santos, Alejandra M.; Aguillon, Cynthia; García, Noemi de Haro; Rodriguez, Jesus D.; Vazquez, Ivan Amaya; Strait, Megan

doi:10.1145/3173386.3177075

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Like female-gendering, preliminary research indicates that racial cues, which are marginalizing in human-human interactions, are similarly marginalizing in human-agent interaction (e.g., [30], [22], [31]). For example, a recent HRI study suggests that people's anti-Black/Brown behavioral biases extend to robots racialized as Black/Brown [30].…”

Section: B Associations Between Racialization and Dehumanizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Robots Racialized in the Likeness of Marginalized Social Identities are Subject to Greater Dehumanization than those racialized as White

Strait

Ramos

Contreras

et al. 2018

2018 27th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)

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The emergence and spread of humanlike robots into increasingly public domains has revealed a concerning phenomenon: people's unabashed dehumanization of robots, particularly those gendered as female. Here we examined this phenomenon further towards understanding whether other socially marginalized cues (racialization in the likeness of Asian and Black identities), like female-gendering, are associated with the manifestation of dehumanization (e.g., objectification, stereotyping) in human-robot interactions. To that end, we analyzed free-form comments (N = 535) on three videos, each depicting a gynoid -Bina48, Nadine, or Yangyang -racialized as Black, White, and Asian respectively. As a preliminary control, we additionally analyzed commentary (N = 674) on three videos depicting women embodying similar identity cues. The analyses indicate that people more frequently dehumanize robots racialized as Asian and Black, than they do of robots racialized as White. Additional, preliminary evaluation of how people's responding towards the gynoids compares to that towards other people suggests that the gynoids' ontology (as robots) further facilitates the dehumanization.

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