Ruth Stock

About

Ruth Stock is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of human-robot interaction, service robotics, and organizational behavior. Her work has fundamentally shaped how scholars and practitioners understand the integration of robotic and artificial intelligence technologies into service environments and workplaces. Her landmark 2017 Service Robot Acceptance Model, drawing on role theory and the Technology Acceptance Model, established a foundational framework for understanding user acceptance of frontline humanoid robots, accumulating 85 citations. Building on this, her 2018 comparative study of humanoid service robots versus human employees (72 citations) challenged conventional assumptions about service quality and innovation. Stock has consistently pushed boundaries across multiple dimensions of human-robot dynamics, exploring employee trust, emotional contagion, privacy concerns in workplace robotics, and even innovative applications such as sign language translation via humanoid avatars. Her 2022 review of human-robot team research (46 citations) synthesized three decades of interdisciplinary scholarship, while her 2025 work on generative AI-powered service robots signals her continued leadership at the field's cutting edge. With over 300 cumulative citations, Stock's body of work provides indispensable theoretical grounding for researchers navigating the rapidly evolving landscape of robotic psychology and AI-driven service encounters.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   A service Robot Acceptance Model: User acceptance of humanoid robots during service encounters

   85 citations · 2017
2. 2
   Can Humanoid Service Robots Perform Better Than Service Employees? A Comparison of Innovative Behavior Cues

   72 citations · 2018
3. 3
   Generative AI Meets Service Robots

   48 citations · 2025
4. 4
   How and When Can Robots Be Team Members? Three Decades of Research on Human–Robot Teams

   46 citations · 2022
5. 5
   Robotic Psychology. What Do We Know about Human-Robot Interaction and What Do We Still Need to Learn?

   25 citations · 2019
6. 6
   Human-Robot Teams: A Review

   11 citations · 2020
7. 7
   RoboTalk - Prototyping a Humanoid Robot as Speech-to-Sign Language Translator

   11 citations · 2019
8. 8
   When Robots Enter Our Workplace: Understanding Employee Trust in Assistive Robots

   6 citations · 2019
9. 9
   Emotion Transfer from Frontline Social Robots to Human Customers During Service Encounters: Testing an Artificial Emotional Contagion Modell.

   6 citations · 2016
10. 10
    Is There a Privacy Paradox in the Workplace?

    4 citations · 2020

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links