Effects of a Robot's Aesthetic Design on the attribution of social capabilities

Abstract

A robot's physical appearance is the most visible and most easily accessible information about its capabilities. The objective of the experiment presented in this paper is to bring insights into the evaluation of a robot's aesthetic design with regard to its social capabilities. Specifically, participants evaluated four human-like and four highly anthropomorphic robots regarding their aesthetic design, specific capabilities, and human-likeness. The robots varied in the quality of the industrial design: two of the human-like as well as two of the anthropomorphic robots have obviously been professionally designed while the others appear less professionally (i.e., rather unsophisticated) designed. The findings demonstrate that participants judged sophisticated designed robots to possess significantly more social capabilities (e.g., honesty, intelligence, emotionality). Human-likeness of the different robots did not have any significant effects on the attribution of social capabilities.