ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognitive Science
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1593536
This article is part of the Research TopicHuman Reactions to Artificial Intelligence with Anthropomorphic FeaturesView all articles
Gendered Anthropomorphism in Human-Robot Interaction: The Role of Robot Gender in Human Motivation in Task Contexts
Provisionally accepted
- 1School of Management, Guangzhou College of Technology and Business, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China
- 2Business School, Shanghai Jian Qiao University, Shanghai, China
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This study investigates how gendered anthropomorphism in robots influences human motivation to undertake challenging tasks within human-robot collaborative settings. Through two experiments-a survey-based experiment (Study 1, N =169) and a behavioral experiment (Study 2, N = 130), we observed how a collocated femaleversus male-gendered robot assistant affects participants' willingness to accept a challenging task. Results revealed that interactions with female-gendered robots elicited significantly greater willingness to undertake a challenging task compared to male-gendered counterparts. This finding advances our understanding of human motivation in modern workplace environments that integrate robotic technologies, and underscores the critical role of gender cues in robot design, particularly in collaborative settings where task engagement and performance are prioritized.
Keywords: HRI, Anthropomorphism, Group process, AI, Human-AI Interaction (HAII)
Received: 14 Mar 2025; Accepted: 10 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhu, Su and Zheng. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Ling Su, School of Management, Guangzhou College of Technology and Business, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China
Lijing Zheng, Business School, Shanghai Jian Qiao University, Shanghai, China
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