Effects of Gender Stereotypes on Trust and Likability in Spoken Human-Robot Interaction

Effects of Gender Stereotypes on Trust and Likability in Spoken Human-Robot Interaction Matthias Kraus, Johannes Kraus, Martin Baumann, Wolfgang Minker Institute of Communications Engineering, Department of Human Factors University of Ulm, Germany {matthias.kraus, johannes.kraus, martin.baumann, wolfgang.minker}@uni-ulm.de Abstract As robots enter more and more areas of everyday life, it becomes necessary for them to interact in an understandable and trustworthy way. In many regards this requires a human-like interaction pattern. This research investigates the influence of gender stereotypes on trust and likability of humanoid robots. In this endeavor, explicit (name and voice) and implicit gender (personality) of robots have been manipulated along with the stereotypicality of a task. 40 participants interacted with a NAO robot to gain feedback on a task they were working on and rated the perception of the robot cooperation partner. While no gender stereotypes were found for the explicit gender, implicit gender showed a strong effect on trust and likability in the stereotypical male task. Participants trusted the male robot more and rated it as more reliable and competent than the female personality robot, while the female robot was perceived as more likable. These findings indicate that for gender stereotypes in robot interaction a differentiation between explicit and implicit stereotypical features have to be drawn and that the task context needs consideration. Future research may look into situational variables that drive stereotypification in human-robot interaction. Keywords: Human-Robot Interaction, Trust, Gender Stereotypes 1. Introduction Due to the recent rapid growth of artificial intelligence, robots will no longer be mere substitutions for labor- intensive and repetitive tasks like for example in industrial automation. As they manage to handle more and more com- plex tasks, they will soon find their way into our daily lives and become our companions. In order to be accepted and trusted as a social companion, future robots need to possess human-like characteristics and social skills. Hence, several studies investigated the effects of gender and personality features in human-robot interaction (Jonsson and Dahlb¨ack, 2013; Park et al., 2012; Tay et al., 2014; L¨ockenhoff et al., 2014). Exemplarily, the results Park et al. (2012) showed that people who interacted with a robot of simi- lar personality (extraversion - introversion) felt more com- fortable than those who engaged with a robot of different personality. According to Joosse et al. (2013) when con- sidering the robot’s gender and personality, the task context in which the interaction takes place is also of great impor- tance. They found that preferences for robot personalities depend on the robot’s role and the stereotype perception people hold for certain tasks. For example, extroverted par- ticipants perceived similarity attraction when the robot was a tour guide, while introverted subjects perceived similarity attraction when the robot was a cleaner. Hence, the consis- tency of a robot’s behavior and the context of a given task or role seems to play a role for perception of the robot. In the scope of this work, we integrated gender stereotyp- ical communication style (male - female personality traits) and gender …

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