The mediating role of anthropomorphism in adopting the intentional stance towards humanoid robots

摘要

Evidence from cognitive psychology showed that cultural differences influence human social cognition, leading to a different activation of social cognitive mechanisms. A growing corpus of literature in Human-Robot Interaction is investigating how culture shapes cognitive processes like anthropomorphism or mind attribution when humans face artificial agents, such as robots. The present paper aims at disentangling the relationship between cultural values, anthropomorphism, and intentionality attribution to robots, in the context of the intentional stance theory. We administered a battery of tests to 600 participants from various nations worldwide and modeled our data with a path model. Results showed a consistent direct influence of collectivism on anthropomorphism but not on the adoption of the intentional stance. Therefore, we further explored this result with a mediation analysis that revealed anthropomorphism as a true mediator between collectivism and the adoption of the intentional stance. We conclude that our findings extend previous literature by showing that the adoption of the intentional stance towards humanoid robots depends on anthropomorphic attribution in the context of cultural values.