Norm-Breaking Responses to Sexist Abuse: A Cross-Cultural Human Robot Interaction Study

Abstract

This article presents a cross-cultural replication of recent work on productively violating gender norms; specifically demonstrating that breaking norms can boost robot credibility while avoiding harmful stereotypes. In this work we demonstrate via a 3 (country) x 3 (robot behaviour) between-subject experiment that these findings replicate cross-culturally across the US, Sweden, and Japan, finding evidence that breaking gender norms boosts robot credibility regardless of gender or cultural context, and regardless of pretest gender biases. Our findings further motivate a call for feminist robots that subvert the existing gender norms of robot design.