Gender Effects in Perceptions of Robots and Humans with Varying Emotional Intelligence

Robots are machines and as such do not have gender. However, many of the gender-related perceptions and expectations formed in human-human interactions may be inadvertently and unreasonably transferred to interactions with social robots. In this paper, we investigate how gender effects in people's perception of robots and humans depend on their emotional intelligence (EI), a crucial component of successful human social interactions. Our results show that participants perceive different levels of EI in robots just as they do in humans. Also, their EI perceptions are affected by gender-related expectations both when judging humans and when judging robots with minimal gender markers, such as voice or even just a name. We discuss the implications for human-robot interactions (HRI) and propose further explorations of EI for future HRI studies.