How People Infer a Humanlike Mind from a Robot Body

Abstract

Robots are entering a wide range of society’s private and public settings, often with a strikingly humanlike appearance and emulating a humanlike mind. When do laypeople attribute a humanlike mind to these machines? In this paper, we reveal a systematic relationship between variations in robots’ humanlike appearance and the mental capacities people infer. In a programmatic, bottom-up investigation across 251 real-world robots, we first decompose humanlike appearance into three distinct appearance dimensions—body-manipulators, face, and surface. Then, we show that experimentally manipulating specific appearance constellations leads people to make specific inferences about a robot’s mental capacities. In particular, while the presence of body-manipulators shapes people’s inferences about a robot’s perception-action capacities, facial and surface appearance shapes people’s inferences about a robot’s affective and moral capacities. This research provides theoretical and methodological clarity on the powerful impact that a robot’s body has on human perceptions of its mind.