A Cross-Country Comparison of Attitudes toward Humanoid Robots in Germany, the US, and India

Abstract

So far, researchers know very little about what people actually expect from humanoid robots during a human-robot interaction. Therefore, this study surveyed 610 non-experts from Germany (133), the US (174), and India (303) and asked them to rate the following attributes regarding humanoid robots: empathy, expertise, reliability, and trust. This paper develops hypotheses, connecting robot attributes to the four cultural dimensions suggested by Hofstede - individualism, masculinity versus femininity, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance. The results show, that India rates all the attributes the highest, and that Germany and the US rate all aspects rather similarly with the largest difference regarding reliability.