How anthropomorphism affects empathy toward robots

A long-standing question within the robotics community is about the degree of human-likeness robots ought to have when interacting with humans. We explore an unexamined aspect of this problem: how people empathize with robots along the anthropomorphic spectrum. We conducted an experiment that measur...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:2009 4th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) pp. 245 - 246
Main Authors: Riek, Laurel D., Rabinowitch, Tal-Chen, Chakrabarti, Bhismadev, Robinson, Peter
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 09.03.2009
IEEE
Series:ACM Conferences
Subjects:
Abstracts
Applied computing > Law, social and behavioral sciences > Psychology
Applied computing > Law, social and behavioral sciences > Sociology
Applied computing > Operations research > Industry and manufacturing > Command and control
Experimentation
Human Factors
Humans
Robots
Seismic measurements
anthropomorphism
empathy
human-robot interaction
emotion
theory of mind
simulation theory
ISBN:1605584045, 9781605584041
ISSN:2167-2121
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:A long-standing question within the robotics community is about the degree of human-likeness robots ought to have when interacting with humans. We explore an unexamined aspect of this problem: how people empathize with robots along the anthropomorphic spectrum. We conducted an experiment that measured how people empathized with robots shown to be experiencing mistreatment by humans. Our results indicate that people empathize more strongly with more human-looking robots and less with mechanical-looking robots.
ISBN:1605584045
9781605584041
ISSN:2167-2121
DOI:10.1145/1514095.1514158