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ABSTRACT
The use of sophisticated machines at the workplace – e.g. robots equipped with artificial intelligence – is on the rise. Since humans tend to experience a threat to human uniqueness in response to machines with human-like mental capabilities, I explored whether the same holds true for status threat, a well-researched variable in the interpersonal workplace literature. Across two experiments (N1 = 104, N2 = 589), humans felt higher status threat towards a robot (Experiment 1, laboratory study) and an artificial intelligence (Experiment 2, online study) that outperformed a human in verbal-creative tasks, requiring agency and experience to solve. Contrary to results from human-human literature, higher status threat was linked with higher willingness to interact with the machine, which I trace back to its high perceived usefulness. I further interpret my findings as a hint that humans are open to using modern-day technology if they assume to benefit from the advantages the technology brings to their own work and therefore accept the feeling of status threat at the same time.
Acknowledgement
The author thanks her colleagues for their valuable comments and suggestions on this work.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(sCitation2007Citation2018 5]).
Notes
1 The twelve participants who gave non-binary answers when being asked for their gender were not included in this analysis.
2 As a side note, this result was additionally confirmed by an analysis with PROCESS model 6, which showed a significant indirect effect for the serial mediation without the inclusion of the moderator variable, B = −0.04, bootstrapped SE = 0.01, bootstrapped 95% CI [−0.07, −0.01].