Perceptions of a robot’s mental states influence performance in a collaborative task for males and females differently

With the increasing use of social robots and automated machines in our daily lives, roboticists need to design robots that are suitable for human-robot collaboration. Prior work suggests that robots that are perceived to be intentional (i.e., are able to experience mental life capacities), can, in most cases, positively affect human-robot collaboration. With studies highlighting the importance of individual differences and how they drive our perception. We aimed to investigate how individual differences in gender moderate the relationship between subjective perceptions of robots and behavioral performance in a human-robot collaborative task. Participants rated a humanoid robot (i.e., iCub) on whether it can experience mental life capacities and completed a collaborative task with it. We correlated their subjective ratings with the completion time of the collaborative task and found a positive correlation between perceiving iCub to experience basic and social emotion with their performance (i.e., movement times). This relationship, however, was evident for males but not females. The results of this study suggest that perceiving humanoid robots as capable of experiencing mental states influences collaborative performance differently depending on gender. These findings can be relevant for the field of social robotics and to successfully design robot interaction partners for workplaces.