Benjamin Robinson

Papers

Total Citations

199

H-Index

About

Benjamin Robinson is a researcher whose work sits at the intersection of human-robot interaction, cross-cultural communication, and behavioral decision-making. He is best known for his influential line of research examining how cultural background and social context shape the way people respond to and collaborate with robotic systems. His landmark study, "When in Rome: The Role of Culture and Context in Adherence to Robot Recommendations" (2010), has accumulated nearly 185 combined citations across multiple publications, establishing him as a key voice in understanding how cultural identity influences trust and compliance in human-robot teams. This work demonstrated that users' cultural frameworks meaningfully affect whether and how they defer to robot collaborators — a finding with significant implications for the design of socially adaptive robotic systems. Building on this foundation, his earlier study "Responsiveness to Robots" (2009) deepened the inquiry by focusing specifically on Chinese participants, revealing how group orientation and communication style — implicit versus explicit — modulate human receptivity to robotic agents. Together, Robinson's contributions offer researchers and designers a richer understanding of the cultural variables that must be considered when deploying robots across diverse global contexts.