Cultural values, but not nationality, predict social inclusion of robots

Abstract

Research highlighted that Western and Eastern cultures differ in socio-cognitive mechanisms, such as social inclusion. Interestingly, social inclusion is a phe-nomenon that might transfer from human-human to human-robot relationships. Although the literature has shown that individual attitudes towards robots are shaped by cultural background, little research has investigated the role of cul-tural differences in the social inclusion of robots. In the present experiment, we investigated how cultural differences, in terms of nationality and individual cul-tural stance, influence social inclusion of the humanoid robot iCub, in a modi-fied version of the Cyberball game, a classical experimental paradigm measur-ing social ostracism and exclusion mechanisms. Moreover, we investigated whether the individual tendency to attribute intentionality towards robots mod-ulates the degree of inclusion of the iCub robot during the Cyberball game. Re-sults suggested that the individuals’ stance towards collectivism and tendency to attribute a mind to robots both predicted the level of social inclusion of the iCub robot in our version of the Cyberball game.