Spontaneous Perspective Taking Toward Robots: The Unique Impact of Humanlike Appearance

Abstract

As robots rapidly enter society, how does human social cognition respond to their novel presence? Focusing on one foundational social-cognitive capacity—visual perspective taking—seven studies reveal that people spontaneously adopt a robot’s unique perspective and do so with patterns of variation that mirror perspective taking toward humans. As they do with humans, people take a robot’s visual perspective when it displays goal-directed actions. Moreover, perspective taking is absent when the agent lacks human appearance, increases when it looks highly humanlike, and persists even when the humanlike agent is perceived as eerie or as obviously lacking a mind. These results suggest that visual perspective taking toward robots is consistent with a “mere appearance hypothesis”—a form of stimulus generalization based on humanlike appearance—rather than following an “uncanny valley” pattern or arising from mind perception. Robots’ superficial human resemblance may trigger and modulate social-cognitive responses in human observers originally developed for human interaction.