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Robots And Racism

Published: 26 February 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Most robots currently being sold or developed are either stylized with white material or have a metallic appearance. In this research we used the shooter bias paradigm and several questionnaires to investigate if people automatically identify robots as being racialized, such that we might say that some robots are 'White' while others are 'Asian', or 'Black'. To do so, we conducted an extended replication of the classic social psychological shooter bias paradigm using robot stimuli to explore whether effects known from human-human intergroup experiments would generalize to robots that were racialized as Black and White. Reaction-time based measures revealed that participants demonstrated 'shooter-bias' toward both Black people and robot racialized as Black. Participants were also willing to attribute a race to the robots depending on their racialization and demonstrated a high degree of inter-subject agreement when it came to these attributions.

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cover image ACM Conferences
HRI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
February 2018
468 pages
ISBN:9781450349536
DOI:10.1145/3171221
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 26 February 2018

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Author Tags

  1. explicit
  2. implicit
  3. prejudice
  4. racism
  5. robot
  6. shooter bias

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HRI '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 49 of 206 submissions, 24%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 268 of 1,124 submissions, 24%

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  • (2024)From “Made In” to Mukokuseki: Exploring the Visual Perception of National Identity in RobotsACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction10.1145/368178214:1(1-21)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2024
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