An Insight into Humans Helping Robots: The Role of Knowledge, Attitudes, Anthropomorphic Cues, and Context of Use

Abstract

Robots are increasingly present in our society. Their successful integration depends, however, on understanding and fostering pro-social behavior towards robots, in this case, helping. To better understand people’s reported willingness to help robots across different contexts (delivery, medical, service, and security), we conducted two preregistered studies on a German-speaking population (N = 415, and N = 542, representative of age and gender). We assessed attitudes, knowledge about robots, and anthropomorphism and investigated their effect on reported willingness to help. Results show that positive attitudes significantly predicted reported higher willingness to help. Contrary to our hypothesis, having more knowledge about robots increased reported willingness to help. Additionally, we found no effect of anthropomorphism, neither in the form of robot appearance nor as participant’s own view about robots, on reported willingness to help. Furthermore, results point to a context-dependency for willingness to help with participants preferring to help robots in a medical context compared to a security one, for example. Our findings thus highlight the relevance of knowledge and attitudes in understanding helping behavior towards robots. Additionally, our results raise questions about the relevance of anthropomorphism in pro-sociality towards robots.