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How people anthropomorphize robots

Published: 12 March 2008 Publication History

Abstract

We explored anthropomorphism in people's reactions to a robot in social context vs. their more considered judgments of robots in the abstract. Participants saw a photo and read transcripts from a health interview by a robot or human interviewer. For half of the participants, the interviewer was polite and for the other half, the interviewer was impolite. Participants then summarized the interactions in their own words and responded true or false to adjectives describing the interviewer. They later completed a post-task survey about whether a robot interviewer would possess moods, attitudes, and feelings. The results showed substantial anthropomorphism in participants' interview summaries and true-false responses, but minimal anthropomorphism in the abstract robot survey. Those who interacted with the robot interviewer tended to anthropomorphize more in the post-task survey, suggesting that as people interact more with robots, their abstract conceptions of them will become more anthropomorphic.

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cover image ACM Conferences
HRI '08: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE international conference on Human robot interaction
March 2008
402 pages
ISBN:9781605580173
DOI:10.1145/1349822
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 12 March 2008

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Author Tags

  1. human-robot interaction
  2. social robots

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HRI '08
HRI '08: International Conference on Human Robot Interaction
March 12 - 15, 2008
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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Overall Acceptance Rate 268 of 1,124 submissions, 24%

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  • (2024)Gaze cue: which body parts will human take as cue to infer a robot’s intention?Journal of Advanced Mechanical Design, Systems, and Manufacturing10.1299/jamdsm.2024jamdsm006018:5(JAMDSM0060-JAMDSM0060)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)Efficacy of relational agents for loneliness across age groups: a systematic review and meta-analysisBMC Public Health10.1186/s12889-024-19153-x24:1Online publication date: 6-Jul-2024
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