The effect of robot appearance types on motivating donation

Abstract

According to the Hawthorne effect, when people feel someone staring at them, they tend to be moral because of psychological pressure. We applied this Hawthorne effect to the appearance design of robots and examined the effect of robot appearance types on motivating donation. We executed a 2 (appearance types: anthropomorphic vs. functional) within-participants experiment (N=20). Participants perceived more social presence to an anthropomorphic robot than a functional robot. In addition, participants were more willing to donate when interacting with an anthropomorphic robot than a functional robot.