The influence of culture on attitudes towards humanoid and animal‐like robots: an integrative review

Purpose The aim of the present review is to explore the influence of culture on attitudes towards humanoid and animal‐like robots. Design An integrative review of current evidence. Methods Medline, CINAHL, PsycInfo, PubMed, and Google Scholar were searched from 2000 to 2017. A total of 22 articles met the inclusion criteria and were retrieved and analyzed. Findings Culture influences attitudes and preferences towards robots, but due to the limitations of the reviewed studies, concrete conclusions cannot be made. More consistent evidence was found with regard to the influence of culture on nonverbal behaviors and communication styles, with people being more accepting of a robot that behaved more closely to their own culture. Conclusions The research field of human–robot interaction provides the current evidence on the influence that culture has on attitudes towards humanoid and animal‐like robots, but more research that is guided by strong theoretical frameworks is needed. Clinical Relevance With the increased use of humanoid robots in the healthcare system, it is imperative that nurses and other healthcare professionals explore and understand the different factors that can affect the use of robots with patients

Do People Change their Behavior when the Handler is next to the Robot?

It is increasingly common for people to work alongside robots in a variety of situations. When a robot is completing a task, the handler of the robot may be present. It is important to know how people interact with the robot when the handler is next to the robot. Our study focuses on whether handler’s presence can affect human’s behavior toward the robot. Our experiment targets two different scenarios (handler present and handler absent) in order to find out human’s behavior change toward the robot. Results show that in the handler present scenario, people are less willing to interact with the robot. However, when people do interact with the robot, they tend to interact with both the handler and the robot. This suggests that researchers should consider the presence of a handler when designing for human-robot interactions

A case study on smart band

학위논문 (석사) -- 서울대학교 대학원 : 공과대학 산업공학과, 2020. 8. 윤명환 .The aim of this study is to prove that the consumer review-based text mining methods proposed in the paper for cross-cultural design are effective. To prove it, we took Mi band 3 as a case study where we compared the cross-cultural differences in product preference of users from different cultural regions with this method. With the development of global market, more and more products and services are sold across the globe. Users from different cultures have different behaviors, cognitive styles, and value systems. Therefore, product should be designed to meet the needs and preferences of users from different cultural groups. In the field of cross-cultural design, existing studies are mainly focused on traditional usability and UX research methods. However, these methods expose some disadvantages when applied into cross-cultural design contexts. E-commerce websites provide a large volume of product reviews and it is easy to collect review data online. There is no need to employ foreign participants or make a survey onsite or remotely, which will save much more cost and time. There is a new trend that customer reviews are examined to know consumer opinions. Neverlessness, there are not many studies by analyzing online reviews in the field of cross-cultural design. Thus, my research proposed consumer review-based text mining methods for cross-cultural design, which consist of aspect-level opinion mining, sentiment analysis, and semantic network analysis. We collected review data from the following three websites: Naver of South Korea, Jingdong of China, and Amazon of the United States. Text mining methods including opinion mining, sentiment analysis, and semantic network analysis were performed. Firstly, product aspects were extracted from reviews according to word frequency. This indicates how much users are paying attention to different aspects of the product. Aspect-level sentiment analysis was conducted to find out customer satisfaction with different product aspects. Then, the words most associated with each product aspect were listed. Cluster analysis was conducted and the topic of each cluster was summarized. Data visualization of each dataset was done. Lastly, cross-cultural difference among three countries from the results was observed and discussed. Though there exist similar issues in product preferences of users from South Korea, China, and the United States, cross-cultural differences about Mi band 3 are shown in many product aspects. Korean tend to take Mi band as a fashionable, cool, yet not useful wearable device. They often buy it as a nice gift. They are interested in the appearance of the strap and often buy straps of different colors and materials. Korean do not enjoy outdoor activities as much as American. And the function of NFC is not prevalent in Korea. Thus, the smart band is not useful to Korean. These can explain why Korean do not care about quality of the smart band and do not want to buy Mi band at a high price. Korean think that the language of Korean on the display, application, and manual is the most important feature. The length of Korean texts is longer than Chinese to convey the same information. On the other hand, Korean prefer to check message notification on smart band rather than call notification. Therefore, Korean need a larger size for screen. Chinese are more concerned about different kinds of functions including fitness tracker (step counting, heart rate monitoring, and sleep monitoring), notification, and NFC. These different functions are all important and practical to Chinese. American enjoy outdoor activities and tend to use smart band mostly as activity tracker. They care more about activity tracker function including heart rate monitoring and step counting than Korean and Chinese. They have a higher requirement about the accuracy of measured data and have more negative reviews on activity tracker function than Korean and Chinese. Besides, they need the mode for swimming. Because American usually use the smart band for outdoor activities, they complain a lot that the screen is prone to scratches and is invisible under the outdoor sunlight. Also, they pay attention to the quality of screen and strap, expecting the material make the screen and strap durable. Besides, battery is the most significant aspect to American. They always try to test each function to find which function makes battery life short. The results of the case study prove that the consumer review-based text mining method proposed in the paper can generate cross-cultural difference in product preference effectively, which is helpful to cross-cultural design research. And this method is relatively easy and fast compared to other conventional methods.Chapter 1. Introduction 1 1.1 Background and Motivation 1 1.2 Research Objective 3 1.3 Organization of the Thesis 4 Chapter 2. Literature Review 5 2.1 Cross-Cultural Design 5 2.1.1 Definition 5 2.1.2 Necessity 6 2.1.3 Method 7 2.2 Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis 10 2.2.1 Aspect Level Opinion Mining 10 2.2.2 Cross-Lingual Opinion Mining 11 2.3 Semantic Network Analysis 13 Chapter 3. Methodology 15 3.1 Data Collection 15 3.2 Data Processing 16 3.2.1 Text Preprocessing 16 3.2.2 Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis 16 3.2.3 Semantic Network Analysis 17 3.2.4 Result Sample 18 Chapter 4. Result 20 4.1 Overview 20 4.2 Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis 21 4.2.1 Normalized Frequency 21 4.2.2 Sentiment Analysis 23 4.3 Semantic Network Analysis 26 4.3.1 Associated Words 26 4.3.1 Cluster Analysis 31 4.3.1 Data Visualization 34 4.4 Results based on Aspects 37 4.4.1 Battery 37 4.4.2 Price 39 4.4.3 Function 41 4.4.4 Step Counting 43 4.4.5 Korean 45 4.4.6 Heart Rate Monitoring 47 4.4.7 Sleep Monitoring 49 4.4.8 Quality 51 4.4.9 Notification 53 4.4.10 Screen 55 4.4.11 Exercise 57 4.4.12 App 59 4.4.13 Call 61 4.4.14 Connection 63 4.4.15 Waterproof 65 4.4.16 Display 67 4.4.17 Message 69 4.4.18 Alarm 71 4.4.19 Gift 73 4.4.20 Strap 75 Chapter 5. Conclusion 78 5.1 Summary of Findings 78 5.2 Future Research 80 Bibliography 82Maste

The influence of culture on attitudes towards humanoid and animal‐like robots: an integrative review

Purpose The aim of the present review is to explore the influence of culture on attitudes towards humanoid and animal‐like robots. Design An integrative review of current evidence. Methods Medline, CINAHL, PsycInfo, PubMed, and Google Scholar were searched from 2000 to 2017. A total of 22 articles met the inclusion criteria and were retrieved and analyzed. Findings Culture influences attitudes and preferences towards robots, but due to the limitations of the reviewed studies, concrete conclusions cannot be made. More consistent evidence was found with regard to the influence of culture on nonverbal behaviors and communication styles, with people being more accepting of a robot that behaved more closely to their own culture. Conclusions The research field of human–robot interaction provides the current evidence on the influence that culture has on attitudes towards humanoid and animal‐like robots, but more research that is guided by strong theoretical frameworks is needed. Clinical Relevance With the increased use of humanoid robots in the healthcare system, it is imperative that nurses and other healthcare professionals explore and understand the different factors that can affect the use of robots with patients

Designing Robotic Movement with Personality

As robots are starting to inhabit more intimate social spheres, their functionality and acceptance in a fundamentally social environment greatly depend on them being tolerated by humans. One factor contributing to successfully accomplishing tasks in a collaborative manner is how robots’ actions and motions are interpreted by the people around them. Our broader research seeks to explore this gap aiming to design movement that is expressive, culturally dependent and contextually sensitive. A country that is at the forefront of this, in terms of social robots and their acceptance in society, is Japan. Therefore, as the first phases of this broader research, we present a new process, including a design toolkit, an open brief and a participatory structure. We discuss the resulting robot morphologies and participant feedback from a workshop in Japan, and conclude by discussing limitations and further research in designing robots with expressive movement, contextually sensitive within an HRI-for-all paradigm

The Public’s Perception of Humanlike Robots: Online Social Commentary Reflects an Appearance-Based Uncanny Valley, a General Fear of a “Technology Takeover”, and the Unabashed Sexualization of Female-Gendered Robots

Towards understanding the public’s perception of humanlike robots, we examined commentary on 24 YouTube videos depicting social robots ranging in human similarity – from Honda’s Asimo to Hiroshi Ishiguro’s Geminoids. In particular, we investigated how people have responded to the emergence of highly humanlike robots (e.g., Bina48) in contrast to those with more prototypically-“robotic” appearances (e.g., Asimo), coding the frequency at which the uncanny valley versus fears of replacement and/or a “technology takeover” arise in online discourse based on the robot’s appearance. Here we found that, consistent with Masahiro Mori’s theory of the uncanny valley, people’s commentary reflected an aversion to highly humanlike robots. Correspondingly, the frequency of uncanny valley-related commentary was significantly higher in response to highly humanlike robots relative to those of more prototypical appearances. Independent of the robots’ human similarity, we further observed a moderate correlation to exist between people’s explicit fears of a “technology takeover” and their emotional responding towards robots. Finally, through the course of our investigation, we encountered a third and rather disturbing trend – namely, the unabashed sexualization of female-gendered robots. In exploring the frequency at which this sexualization manifests in the online commentary, we found it to exceed that of both the uncanny valley and fears of robot sentience/replacement combined. In sum, these findings help to shed light on the relevance of the uncanny valley “in the wild” and further, they help situate it with respect to other design challenges for HRI

Social robots on a global stage: establishing a role for culture during a Human-Robot interaction

Robotic agents designed to assist people across a variety of social and service settings are becoming increasingly prevalent across the world. Here we synthesise two decades of empirical evidence from human–robot interaction (HRI) research to focus on cultural influences on expectations towards and responses to social robots, as well as the utility of robots displaying culturally specific social cues for improving human engagement. Findings suggest complex and intricate relationships between culture and human cognition in the context of HRI. The studies reviewed here transcend the often-studied and prototypical east–west dichotomy of cultures, and explore how people’s perceptions of robots are informed by their national culture as well as their experiences with robots. Many of the findings presented in this review raise intriguing questions concerning future directions for robotics designers and cultural psychologists, in terms of conceptualising and delivering culturally sensitive robots. We point out that such development is currently limited by heterogenous methods and low statistical power, which contribute to a concerning lack of generalisability. We also propose several avenues through which future work may begin to address these shortcomings. In sum, we highlight the critical role of culture in mediating efforts to develop robots aligned with human users’ cultural backgrounds, and argue for further research into the role of culturally-informed robotic development in facilitating human–robot interaction

Year of the Golden Jubilee: Culture Change in the Past, Present and Future

Part 1 of the IACCP Proceedings contains the abstracts and links to the recordings of the XXVI Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2022. (c) 2023, International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychologyhttps://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/iaccp_proceedings/1011/thumbnail.jp

Abstracts and Recorded Presentations

The abstracts are organized in the following way: All special events (keynotes, award presentations, meet the editor, pre-conference workshops, provocation sessions, etc.) are presented first. All other presentations are organized along the Thematic Streams in alphabetical order. Within each Thematic Stream, the order follows the structure: symposia, individual papers, and posters

Robotic Faces: Exploring Dynamical Patterns of Social Interaction between Humans and Robots

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Informatics, 2015The purpose of this dissertation is two-fold: 1) to develop an empirically-based design for an interactive robotic face, and 2) to understand how dynamical aspects of social interaction may be leveraged to design better interactive technologies and/or further our understanding of social cognition. Understanding the role that dynamics plays in social cognition is a challenging problem. This is particularly true in studying cognition via human-robot interaction, which entails both the natural social cognition of the human and the “artificial intelligence” of the robot. Clearly, humans who are interacting with other humans (or even other mammals such as dogs) are cognizant of the social nature of the interaction – their behavior in those cases differs from that when interacting with inanimate objects such as tools. Humans (and many other animals) have some awareness of “social”, some sense of other agents. However, it is not clear how or why. Social interaction patterns vary across culture, context, and individual characteristics of the human interactor. These factors are subsumed into the larger interaction system, influencing the unfolding of the system over time (i.e. the dynamics). The overarching question is whether we can figure out how to utilize factors that influence the dynamics of the social interaction in order to imbue our interactive technologies (robots, clinical AI, decision support systems, etc.) with some "awareness of social", and potentially create more natural interaction paradigms for those technologies. In this work, we explore the above questions across a range of studies, including lab-based experiments, field observations, and placing autonomous, interactive robotic faces in public spaces. We also discuss future work, how this research relates to making sense of what a robot "sees", creating data-driven models of robot social behavior, and development of robotic face personalities