Kate Mays - Dissertation Defense

EMS PhD student, Kate Mays, will be holding her dissertation defense via Zoom on Friday November 13, 10am-11:15am. If you wish to attend, please register in advance via this link using your BU email address: https://bostonu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMqcuysqD0vGNRLNsjgzNwWOF9NWIUSY-Jf Kate will present her research for approximately 25 minutes. This will be followed by questions from the committee, lasting approximately 45 minutes. Please note that the audience may observe but may not comment or ask questions. The committee will then deliberate in private. You can find more information about Kate’s dissertation research below: Humanizing Robots? The Influence of Appearance and Status on Social Perceptions of Robots Social robots are a lesser known technology with uncertain but seemingly very powerful potential, which for decades has been portrayed in cultural artifacts as threats to human primacy. Research on people’s relationships to non-robotic technology, however, indicates that people will treat robots socially and assimilate them into their lives in ways that may disrupt existing norms but still fulfill a fundamental human need. Through the theoretical lenses of media equation and apparatgiest, this dissertation examines facets of robot humanization, defined as how people think of robots as social and human-like entities through perceptions of liking, human-likeness, and rights’ entitlement. In a 2 (gender) x 2 (physical humanness) x 3 (status) between-subjects online experiment, this dissertation explores the influence of fixed technological traits (the robot’s gender, physical humanness, and described status) and participants’ individual differences on humanization perceptions. Findings show that the robots’ features mattered less than participants’ individual traits, which explained the most variance in humanizing perceptions of social robots. Of those, participants’ prior robot exposure (both in real life and mediated) and efficacy traits were the strongest predictors of robot liking, perceived human-likeness, and perceptions of rights entitlement. Specifically, those with more real-life exposure and who perceived themselves as more technologically competent were more likely to humanize robots, while those with higher internal loci of control and negative mediated views of robots were less inclined to humanize robots. Theoretically, this study’s findings suggest that technological affordances matter less than the ontological understanding that social robots as a category may have in people’s humanizing perceptions. Looking forward, these findings indicate that there is an opportunity in the design of social robots to set precedents now that are prosocial and reflective of the world people strive for and want to inhabit in the future.