Stereotypical nationality representations in HRI: perspectives from international young adults

People often form immediate expectations about other people, or groups of people, based on visual appearance and characteristics of their voice and speech. These stereotypes, often inaccurate or overgeneralized, may translate to robots that carry human-like qualities. This study aims to explore if nationality-based preconceptions regarding appearance and accents can be found in people’s perception of a virtual and a physical social robot. In an online survey with 80 subjects evaluating different first-language-influenced accents of English and nationality-influenced human-like faces for a virtual robot, we find that accents, in particular, lead to preconceptions on perceived competence and likeability that correspond to previous findings in social science research. In a physical interaction study with 74 participants, we then studied if the perception of competence and likeability is similar after interacting with a robot portraying one of four different nationality representations from the online survey. We find that preconceptions on national stereotypes that appeared in the online survey vanish or are overshadowed by factors related to general interaction quality. We do, however, find some effects of the robot’s stereotypical alignment with the subject group, with Swedish subjects (the majority group in this study) rating the Swedish-accented robot as less competent than the international group, but, on the other hand, recalling more facts from the Swedish robot’s presentation than the international group does. In an extension in which the physical robot was replaced by a virtual robot interacting in the same scenario online, we further found the same results that preconceptions are of less importance after actual interactions, hence demonstrating that the differences in the ratings of the robot between the online survey and the interaction is not due to the interaction medium. We hence conclude that attitudes towards stereotypical national representations in HRI have a weak effect, at least for the user group included in this study (primarily educated young students in an international setting)