Keep an Eye on the Task! How Gender Typicality of Tasks Influence Human–Robot Interactions

Abstract

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.

Robots and Gender

“…Kuchenbrandt and her colleagues 19 reported a different type of interaction between robot and human gender. In their experiment, 73 German participants (male N = 38; female N = 35) performed sorting tasks of items on a touch-screen table by using instructions given by a small-sized humanoid robot (NAO mentioned in the Introduction).…”

Affective Touch in Human–Robot Interaction: Conveying Emotion to the Nao Robot

“…In addition, potential gender differences were investigated. Previous studies show that gender, in terms of human gender, robot gender, computer voice gender, and gender typicality of tasks, can have an influence on the human experience and perception of the interaction as well as the human behaviour [32,38,40,41,45]. The application of robots in different social domains, e.g.…”

Living with robots : investigating the user acceptance of social robots in domestic environments

“…People are more likely to follow the recommendations from a smaller robot (Shiomi et al, 2013), and are more willingly to accept smaller robots for assistive tasks (Wu, Fassert, & Rigaud, 2012). Moreover, a robot's apparent gender deduces traditional role stereotypes Kuchenbrandt et al, 2012), influence how they are evaluated , and affect human-robot collaboration (Koulouri et al, 2012). As the embodiment of robots influences many aspects of the user's interaction experiences with these robots, researchers should incorporate their influence when evaluating human-robot interaction and social robot acceptance.…”