Associations Between Gender Attributions and Social Perception of Humanoid Robots

With the thriving integration of robots in work spaces, user acceptance and trust in robots are particularly important. Both aspects are influenced by various factors, e.g., social perception. Gender considerably affects social perception of humans, however, whether gender attributions to robots hold similar implications is still unclear. We investigated this question with two samples (N1 = 238, N2 = 133) who rated four images of humanoid robots in terms of gender and social dimensions, i.e., anthropomorphism, sociability/morality, activity/cooperation, and competence. We found that in both samples gender perception differed significantly, but only perceived competence and sociability/morality varied as a function of gender: More femininity was associated with higher attributions of sociability/morality and lower attributions of competence. We take this as an indicator that gender influences social perception and should be considered as additional aspect when it comes to designing robots. However, gendering robots might also pose ethical risks in terms of deception and unwanted amplification of gender stereotypes.