Promotors or inhibitors? Role of task type on the effect of humanoid service robots on consumers’ use intention

ABSTRACT

Despite the pervasiveness of service robots in hospitality industry, it is unclear how highly human-like service robots elicit aversive effect on consumers’ use intention in addition to discomfort and when the aversive effect can be mitigated. Three experimental studies were conducted, showing that highly human-like service robots elicit greater consumer discomfort and decrease task attraction toward robots, in turn weakening consumers’ use interaction. Moreover, this research identified that emotional-social tasks (vs. mechanical tasks) mitigated the aversive effects of highly human-like service robots on consumers’ responses. The research extends the uncanny valley and mind perception theories and offers some guidelines for employing service robots with different degree of anthropomorphism.

尽管服务机器人在酒店业中非常普遍, 但尚不清楚除了不适之外,类似人类的服务机器人在多大程度上会对消费者的使用意图产生厌恶效应, 以及厌恶效应何时可以缓解. 进行了三项实验研究, 结果表明, 高度人性化的服务机器人会引起消费者更大的不适感, 降低对机器人的任务吸引力, 进而削弱消费者的使用互动. 此外, 这项研究还发现, 情感社交任务, 与机械任务相比, 减轻了高度人性化的服务机器人对消费者反应的厌恶效应. 这项研究扩展了神秘谷和心智感知理论, 并为使用具有不同程度拟人化的服务机器人提供了一些指导.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropomorphic service robots
• consumers’ use intention
• discomfort
• task attraction
• mechanical tasks
• emotional-social tasks

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website

Highlights

• Consumers prefer to use moderately human-like and machine-like robots to highly humanlike robots.

• Highly human-like robots elicit greater discomfort, in turn weakening consumers’ use intention.

• Highly human-like robots decrease task attraction, in turn weakening consumers’ use intention.

• For emotional-social tasks, the aversive response to highly human-like robots is mitigated.

• The study advances uncanny valley and mind perception theories and technology-task fit model.

Notes

1. https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JTF-10-2019-0106/full/html

2. https://www.softwareadvice.com/hotel-management/industryview/technology-use-report-2015/

Additional information

Funding

This study is supported by The National Natural Science Foundation of China [#71972077].