Robot social presence and gender

Abstract

Social-psychological processes in humans will play an important role in long-term human-robot interactions. This study investigates people's perceptions of social presence in robots during (relatively) short interactions. Findings indicate that males tend to think of the robot as more human-like and accordingly show some evidence of "social facilitation" on an arithmetic task as well as more socially desirable responding on a survey administered by a robot. In contrast, females saw the robot as more machine-like, exhibited less socially desirable responding to the robot's survey, and were not socially facilitated by the robot while engaged in the arithmetic tasks. Various alternative accounts of these findings are explored and the implications of these results for future work are discussed.