Cross-Cultural Differences in Comfort with Humanlike Robots.

The uncanny valley hypothesis describes how people are often less comfortable with highly humanlike robots. However, this discomfort may vary cross-culturally. This research tests how increasing robots' physical and mental human likeness affects people's comfort with robots in the United States and Japan, countries whose cultural and religious contexts differ in ways that are relevant to the evaluation of humanlike robots. We find that increasing physical and mental human likeness decreases comfort among Americans but not among Japanese participants. One potential explanation for these differences it that Japanese participants perceived robots to be more animate, having more of a mind, a soul, and consciousness, relative to American participants.

Conservatism predicts aversion to consequential Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize society by automating tasks as diverse as driving cars, diagnosing diseases, and providing legal advice. The degree to which AI can improve outcomes in these and other domains depends on how comfortable people are trusting AI for these tasks, which in turn depends on lay perceptions of AI. The present research examines how these critical lay perceptions may vary as a function of conservatism. Using five survey experiments, we find that political conservatism is associated with low comfort with and trust in AI-i.e., with AI aversion. This relationship between conservatism and AI aversion is explained by the link between conservatism and risk perception; more conservative individuals perceive AI as being riskier and are therefore more averse to its adoption. Finally, we test whether a moral reframing intervention can reduce AI aversion among conservatives.

Could a rising robot workforce make humans less prejudiced?

Automation is becoming ever more prevalent, with robot workers replacing many human employees. Many perspectives have examined the economic impact of a robot workforce, but here we consider its social impact: How will the rise of robot workers affect intergroup relations? Whereas some past research has suggested that more robots will lead to more intergroup prejudice, we suggest that robots could also reduce prejudice by highlighting commonalities between all humans. As robot workers become more salient, intergroup differences-including racial and religious differences-may seem less important, fostering a perception of common human identity (i.e., panhumanism). Six studies (ΣN = 3,312) support this hypothesis. Anxiety about the rising robot workforce predicts less anxiety about human outgroups (Study 1), and priming the salience of a robot workforce reduces prejudice toward outgroups (Study 2), makes people more accepting of outgroup members as leaders and family members (Study 3), and increases wage equality across ingroup and outgroup members in an economic simulation (Study 4). This effect is mediated by panhumanism (Studies 5-6), suggesting that the perception of a common human ingroup explains why robot salience reduces prejudice. We discuss why automation may sometimes exacerbate intergroup tensions and other times reduce them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).