The effect of robot appearance types on motivating donation

Abstract

According to the Hawthorne effect, when people feel someone staring at them, they tend to be moral because of psychological pressure. We applied this Hawthorne effect to the appearance design of robots and examined the effect of robot appearance types on motivating donation. We executed a 2 (appearance types: anthropomorphic vs. functional) within-participants experiment (N=20). Participants perceived more social presence to an anthropomorphic robot than a functional robot. In addition, participants were more willing to donate when interacting with an anthropomorphic robot than a functional robot.

Influence of perspective taking through robotic virtual agents on prosocial behavior

“…In the field of HRI, several robots have been developed to promote donation [31], which has been treated as a representation of altruistic behavior [32]. In addition, in the fields of HRI and HAI, studies have been done on the factors of robots and agents that promote donation, such as the social background of users [33], where a robot is installed [34], the gender of a robot [35], the appearance of a robot [36], the head behavior of humanoid robots [37], and the facial expressions of virtual agents [38].…”

Robot–City Interaction: Mapping the Research Landscape—A Survey of the Interactions Between Robots and Modern Cities

“…Indeed, many of the selected works focus on advanced navigation algorithms combined with state-of-the-art sensor technologies [29,38,56,57,62,90]. Verbal communication and acquisition, which are medium-sized in the figure, are also somewhat common: This happens mostly in contexts where robots are required to interact with the citizens to achieve their goals, as in [30,39,45,53,69,87]. The ability of management is mostly employed in combination with perception and navigation-typically scenarios involving more than one robot, e.g.…”

“…High (22) 33.3% narios where the human presence is not necessary, such as driverless cars [3,25,40,51,61,110,112] and infrastructure maintenance [17,41,59,67,76,86,89]; on the contrary, a low to medium level of autonomy is observed when citizens are involved, both through public engagement [13,22,30,49,53,87,88,109] and personal assistance [10,39,45,69,83].…”

“…In this sense, citizens are mostly seen as variables of a highly dynamic environment, which have to be considered equally to other obstacles. With that said, closer interactions of a social or personal nature are also common, namely in scenarios involving citizens for private or public assistance [10,13,30,49,53,83,87,88,109]. Figure 12 show how robots interact with their surrounding geographical space (the land).…”

“…Techniques from ubiquitous computing, wireless sensor networks, HRI and social science are employed to study both a wide range of aspects, from infrastructure and networking, to ethical and social acceptance. Works here can be divided into architectures and frameworks allowing interaction between robots, humans and ubiquitous sensors [33,68,94], and works aiming at analyzing the public engagement and social acceptance, either on demand [30,53,87,109], or through personalization [22], or directly using the robots' proactivity [13,49,88].…”