Abstract
Our own past work has shown that, surprisingly, the perceived gender of a robotic comedian does not influence human ratings of the robot’s humorousness, warmth, competence, comfort, or social closeness. This result differed from previous work on gendered robots in other historically gendered roles (e.g., healthcare and security), but the work was also conducted with university student participants, a population known to be relatively progressive. The present paper is a follow-up study in which we sought a more diverse (and possibly biased toward gender role congruence) participant group using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Participants (N = 148) observed a clip of a robotic comedian with either a male or a female voice, after which we measured self-reported ratings of robot attributes. Results replicated the gender-related findings from our previous work, as well as provided insights as to how the previous and current participant populations differed in their opinions of robotic comedians. These findings confirm that gender stereotypes have less influence than expected on robot comedy performance, an insight on which designers of playful robots can build.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Aron, A., Aron, E.N., Smollan, D.: Inclusion of other in the self scale and the structure of interpersonal closeness. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 63(4), 596 (1992)
Bartneck, C., Kulić, D., Croft, E., Zoghbi, S.: Measurement instruments for the anthropomorphism, animacy, likeability, perceived intelligence, and perceived safety of robots. Int. J. Soc. Robot. 1(1), 71–81 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-008-0001-3
Carpenter, J., Davis, J.M., Erwin-Stewart, N., Lee, T.R., Bransford, J.D., Vye, N.: Gender representation and humanoid robots designed for domestic use. Int. J. Soc. Robot. 1(3), 261 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-009-0016-4
Carpinella, C.M., Wyman, A.B., Perez, M.A., Stroessner, S.J.: The robotic social attributes scale (RoSAS) development and validation. In: Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), pp. 254–262 (2017)
Dufour, F., Ehrwein Nihan, C.: Do robots need to be stereotyped? technical characteristics as a moderator of gender stereotyping. Soc. Sci. 5(3), 27 (2016)
Eagly, A.H., Steffen, V.J.: Gender stereotypes stem from the distribution of women and men into social roles. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 46(4), 735 (1984)
Eyssel, F., Hegel, F.: (S)he’s got the look: gender stereotyping of robots. J. Appl. Soc. Psychol. 42(9), 2213–2230 (2012)
Fleischer, A., Mead, A.D., Huang, J.: Inattentive responding in MTurk and other online samples. Ind. Organ. Psychol. 8(2), 196–202 (2015)
Gosling, S.D., Rentfrow, P.J., Swann, W.B., Jr.: A very brief measure of the Big-Five personality domains. J. Res. Pers. 37(6), 504–528 (2003)
Greengross, G., Miller, G.: Humor ability reveals intelligence, predicts mating success, and is higher in males. Intelligence 39(4), 188–192 (2011)
Greengross, G., Silvia, P.J., Nusbaum, E.C.: Sex differences in humor production ability: a meta-analysis. J. Res. Pers. 84, 103886 (2020)
Hauser, D.J., Schwarz, N.: Attentive Turkers: MTurk participants perform better on online attention checks than do subject pool participants. Behav. Res. Methods 48(1), 400–407 (2016). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-015-0578-z
Katevas, K., Healey, P.G., Harris, M.T.: Robot comedy lab: experimenting with the social dynamics of live performance. Front. Psychol. 6, 1253 (2015)
Kraus, M., Kraus, J., Baumann, M., Minker, W.: Effects of gender stereotypes on trust and likability in spoken human-robot interaction. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) (2018)
Kwak, S.S., Kim, Y., Kim, E., Shin, C., Cho, K.: What makes people empathize with an emotional robot?: the impact of agency and physical embodiment on human empathy for a robot. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), pp. 180–185 (2013)
Levitt, A.: Statistics show dudes still get majority of bookings at stand-up comedy shows. https://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2018/01/10/statistics-show-dudes-still-get-majority-of-bookings-at-stand-up-comedy-shows
Mori, M., MacDorman, K.F., Kageki, N.: The uncanny valley [from the field]. IEEE Robot. Autom. Mag. 19(2), 98–100 (2012)
Nakauchi, Y., Simmons, R.: A social robot that stands in line. Auton. Robot. 12(3), 313–324 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1015273816637
Nass, C., Steuer, J., Tauber, E.R.: Computers are social actors. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 72–78 (1994)
Nass, C.I., Moon, Y., Morkes, J., Kim, E.Y., Fogg, B.: Computers are social actors: a review of current research. Human Val. Des. Comput. Technol. 72, 137–162 (1997)
Nomura, T., Suzuki, T., Kanda, T., Kato, K.: Measurement of negative attitudes toward robots. Interact. Stud. 7(3), 437–454 (2006)
Pereira, A., Martinho, C., Leite, I., Paiva, A.: iCat, the chess player: the influence of embodiment in the enjoyment of a game. In: Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pp. 1253–1256 (2008)
Raghunath, N., Myers, P., Sanchez, C.A., Fitter, N.T.: Women Are funny: influence of apparent gender and embodiment in robot comedy. In: Li, H., et al. (eds.) ICSR 2021. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 13086, pp. 3–13. Springer, Cham (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90525-5_1
Scheeff, M., Pinto, J., Rahardja, K., Snibbe, S., Tow, R.: Experiences with sparky, a social robot. In: Dautenhahn, K., Bond, A., Cañamero, L., Edmonds, B. (eds.) Socially Intelligent Agents, Multiagent Systems, Artificial Societies, and Simulated Organizations, vol. 3, pp. 173–180. Springer, Boston (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/0-306-47373-9_21
Tay, B., Jung, Y., Park, T.: When stereotypes meet robots: the double-edge sword of robot gender and personality in human-robot interaction. Comput. Hum. Behav. 38, 75–84 (2014)
Tay, B.T., Low, S.C., Ko, K.H., Park, T.: Types of humor that robots can play. Comput. Hum. Behav. 60, 19–28 (2016)
Toich, M.J., Schutt, E., Fisher, D.M.: Do you get what you pay for? preventing insufficient effort responding in MTurk and student samples. Appl. Psychol. 71, 1–22 (2021)
Vilk, J., Fitter, N.T.: Comedians in cafes getting data: evaluating timing and adaptivity in real-world robot comedy performance. In: Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), pp. 223–231 (2020)
Wainer, J., Feil-Seifer, D.J., Shell, D.A., Mataric, M.J.: Embodiment and human-robot interaction: a task-based perspective. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), pp. 872–877 (2007)
Wang, S., Lilienfeld, S.O., Rochat, P.: The uncanny valley: existence and explanations. Rev. Gen. Psychol. 19(4), 393–407 (2015)
Zhang, B., Gearhart, S.: Collecting online survey data: a comparison of data quality among a commercial panel & MTurk. Surv. Pract. 13, 1–10 (2020)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Raghunath, N., Sanchez, C.A., Fitter, N.T. (2022). Robot Comedy (is) Special: A Surprising Lack of Bias for Gendered Robotic Comedians. In: Cavallo, F., et al. Social Robotics. ICSR 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13818. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24670-8_58
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24670-8_58
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-24669-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-24670-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)