Department of Psychology, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA.
Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership, Warfighter Effectiveness Research Center, U. S. Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, CO, USA.
Ergonomics. 2020 Apr;63(4):421-439. doi: 10.1080/00140139.2020.1734242. Epub 2020 Mar 4.
Stereotypes are cognitive shortcuts that facilitate efficient social judgments about others. Just as causal attributions affect perceptions of people, they may similarly affect perceptions of technology, particularly anthropomorphic technology such as robots. In a scenario-based study, younger and older adults judged the performance and capability of an anthropomorphised robot that appeared young or old. In some cases, the robot successfully performed a task while at other times it failed. Results showed that older adult participants were more susceptible to aging stereotypes as indicated by trust. In addition, both younger and older adult participants succumbed to aging stereotypes when measuring perceived capability of the robots. Finally, a summary of causal reasoning results showed that our participants may have applied aging stereotypes to older-appearing robots: they were most likely to give credit to a properly functioning robot when it appeared and performed a task. Our results tentatively suggest that human theories of social cognition do not wholly translate to technology-based contexts and that future work may elaborate on these findings. Perception and expectations of the capabilities of robots may influence whether users accept and use them, especially older users. The current results suggest that care must be taken in the design of these robots as users may stereotype them.
刻板印象是一种认知捷径，可以帮助我们有效地对他人进行社会判断。就像因果归因会影响人们的看法一样，它们也可能会影响对技术的看法，尤其是拟人化技术，如机器人。在基于场景的研究中，年轻和年长的成年人对看起来年轻或年老的拟人化机器人的性能和能力进行了判断。在某些情况下，机器人成功地完成了任务，而在其他情况下，它失败了。结果表明，年长的参与者更容易受到信任所体现的老龄化刻板印象的影响。此外，当测量机器人的感知能力时，年轻和年长的参与者都屈服于老龄化刻板印象。最后，因果推理结果的总结表明，我们的参与者可能已经将老龄化刻板印象应用于看起来更老的机器人：当一个看起来和执行任务的机器人正常运行时，他们最有可能给予其信任。我们的研究结果初步表明，人类的社会认知理论并不能完全转化为基于技术的情境，未来的研究可能会进一步阐述这些发现。对机器人能力的感知和期望可能会影响用户是否接受和使用它们，尤其是老年用户。目前的研究结果表明，在设计这些机器人时必须小心谨慎，因为用户可能会对它们进行刻板印象。
