Robots are helping us fight Covid-19, but can we learn to love them?
- From taking swab tests to reminding people to wear a mask, service robots have been indispensable to global efforts to end the coronavirus pandemic
- Yet, given the unease many people still feel towards robots, the next stage of development will focus on making them more friendly rather than more functional
First, let’s look at how service robots have been used during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Depending on the application field, service robots can be further categorised as personal service robots (e.g. domestic servant robots) or professional service robots (e.g. firefighting robots and surgical robots).
The highly contagious nature of Covid-19 has accelerated the development and adoption of professional service robots, especially in areas that require human contact, such as delivery, cleaning and medical care.
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While engineers and entrepreneurs are working to improve the performance of these robots, we as human behaviour researchers are interested in their psychological impact – that is, how do people react to these robots, both emotionally and attitudinally?
We believe that two factors are important here: firstly, the degree to which the robots are humanised, and secondly, how we perceive the human-robot relationship.
Despite being highly efficient, robots often appear cold or ruthless. They lack the human capacity for emotions, and thus empathy. As a result, research shows that when being treated by machine-like robots, people tend to feel objectified, which then causes unfavourable feelings towards the robots, despite their ability to help people.
Psychologists suggest that when non-human objects are made to look like humans, they become more familiar, understandable and controllable. Therefore, people generally feel more comfortable interacting with a humanlike (rather than machine-like) robot.
However, research has also shown that if there is a mismatch between a close-to-human robot’s anticipated human qualities and its actual, imperfect qualities, people will generate negative feelings.
Furthermore, research studies conducted in our lab found that how we perceive the robot-human relationship can influence our psychological responses to robots. Traditionally, people tend to view robots as subordinates that work for people to achieve an intended goal. However, we can also think of robots as teammates working shoulder to shoulder with humans to accomplish a shared goal.
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Thinking of service robots as our teammates, instead of subordinates, has beneficial consequences: using controlled experiments, we find that people behave more prosocially (e.g. more willing to donate to others in need) if they perceive professional service robots that provide assistance in hazardous situations as teammates, rather than subordinates.
A possible reason for this difference is that viewing robots as our teammates creates a sense of community, which motivates people to contribute to a collective welfare.
While no one knows when this pandemic will end, we can be sure that professional service robots will play an increasingly important role in the war against Covid-19.
Dr Fangyuan Chen is an assistant professor of marketing at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University
