Do Robots Have Race?: Race, Social Construction, and HRI

Abstract

In a paper presented at the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI 2018), Bartneck and colleagues (myself included) argued that people attribute race to humanoid robots [1]. The experiments we conducted suggested that people are willing to identify robots as being of different races when asked and that, at least when confronted with the shooter bias test [2], people also behave in ways that suggest they attribute race to robots. This article joins a small number of other articles in providing evidence that people attribute racial and/or ethnic identities to robots [3], [4]. While the methods we used in our research have come in for some criticism [5], the article has at least highlighted this question as a topic for future research.