(S)he's Got the Look: Gender Stereotyping of Robots¹

Abstract

Previous research on gender effects in robots has largely ignored the role of facial cues. We fill this gap in the literature by experimentally investigating the effects of facial gender cues on stereotypical trait and application ascriptions to robots. As predicted, the short‐haired male robot was perceived as more agentic than was the long‐haired female robot, whereas the female robot was perceived as more communal than was the male counterpart. Analogously, stereotypically male tasks were perceived more suitable for the male robot, relative to the female robot, and vice versa. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that gender stereotypes, which typically bias social perceptions of humans, are even applied to robots. Implications for design‐related decisions are discussed.

The influence of social cues in persuasive social robots on psychological reactance and compliance

“…Relatedly, the social-cues hypothesis (Louwerse, Graesser, Lu, & Mitchell, 2005) explained that adding human features as social cues on the robot like facial expression, voice, and physical presentation could enhance the chance for a human to perceive the technology more positively. This hypothesis was also supported by findings in several studies (Andrist, Spannan, & Mutlu, 2013;Cooney, Dignam, & Brady, 2015;Eyssel & Hegel, 2012).…”

Shape It – The Influence of Robot Body Shape on Gender Perception in Robots

“…Participants had to judge to what extent they would use the robot for a list of 12 gender stereotypical tasks that were adapted from [2]. Six tasks were defined as stereotypically male (e.g., "to transport goods", a = .84).…”

“…Therefore, the present research sought to investigate the effects of robot body shape on gender stereotypical judgments about allegedly male vs. female robots. Like [2], we explored the attribution of gender stereotypical traits such as communion and agency or warmth and competence, respectively [5][6][7]. Stereotypes can also impact peoples' trust in others [7].…”

Can Humanoid Service Robots Perform Better Than Service Employees? A Comparison of Innovative Behavior Cues

“…This research is based on prior findings showing that humans can observe a robot's expressed behaviors [29] [30] [31]. Previous research has shown that people use visual gender cues as a basis for their judgments about social robots [32] and react on social robotic [33] behavior.…”