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 andautomated machines in our daily lives, roboticists need to designrobots that are suitable for human-robot collaboration. Priorwork suggests that robots that are perceived to be intentional(i.e., are able to experience mental life capacities), can, in mostcases, positively affect human-robot collaboration. With studieshighlighting the importance of individual differences and howthey drive our perception. We aimed to investigate howindividual differences in gender moderate the relationshipbetween subjective perceptions of robots and behavioralperformance in a human-robot collaborative task. Participantsrated a humanoid robot (i.e., iCub) on whether it can experiencemental life capacities and completed a collaborative task with it.We correlated their subjective ratings with the completion timeof the collaborative task and found a positive correlationbetween perceiving iCub to experience basic and social emotionwith their performance (i.e., movement times). This relationship,however, was evident for males but not females. The results ofthis study suggest that perceiving humanoid robots as capable ofexperiencing mental states influences collaborative performancedifferently depending on gender. These findings can be relevantfor the field of social robotics and to successfully design robotinteraction partners for workplaces.