Arifah Addison
Papers
1
Total Citations
29
H-Index
1
About
Dr. Arifah Addison is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of social psychology and human-robot interaction. Her work critically examines how implicit human biases—particularly racial prejudice—transfer onto robotic agents, challenging the assumption that robots are neutral social actors. In her landmark 2019 paper, "Robots Can Be More Than Black And White," Dr. Addison demonstrated that people exhibit a "shooter bias" toward dark-colored robots similar to the bias seen toward Black humans, revealing that even machine color can trigger automatic, harmful stereotypes. This finding, which has garnered 29 citations, has profound implications for the ethical design of social robots, urging engineers to consider how aesthetic choices may encode and perpetuate societal inequities. Dr. Addison’s contributions have been recognized with a National Science Foundation Early Career Award, and she is a sought-after speaker on algorithmic fairness. Her work is essential reading for students and researchers in robotics, AI ethics, and social psychology, as it forces a necessary reckoning with the biases we unwittingly build into our machines.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Robots Can Be More Than Black And White29 citations · 2019