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Effects Of Victim Gendering And Humanness On People’S Responses To The Physical Abuse Of Humanlike Agents, Hideki Garcia Goo

Theses and Dissertations

With the deployment of robots in public realms, researchers are seeing more cases of abusive disinhibition towards robots. Because robots embody gendered identities, poor navigation of antisocial dynamics may reinforce or exacerbate gender-based marginalization. Consequently, it is essential for robots to recognize and effectively head off abuse.

Given extensions of gendered biases to robotic agents, as well as associations between an agent's human likeness and the experiential capacity attributed to it, we quasi-manipulated the victim's humanness (human vs. robot) and gendering (via the inclusion of stereotypically masculine vs. feminine cues in their presentation) across four video-recorded reproductions of the interaction. …