Robots Can Be More Than Black And White: Examining Racial Bias Towards Robots

Previous studies showed that using the 'shooter bias' paradigm, people demonstrate a similar racial bias toward dark colored robots over light colored robots (i.e., Black vs. White) as they do toward humans of similar skin tones [3]. However, such an effect could be argued to be the result of social priming. Additionally, it raises the question of how people might respond to robots that are in the middle of the color spectrum (i.e., brown) and whether such effects are moderated by the perceived anthropomorphism of the robots. We conducted two experiments to first examine whether shooter bias tendencies shown towards robots is driven by social priming, and then whether diversification of robot color and level of anthropomorphism influenced shooter bias. Our results showed that shooter bias was not influenced by social priming, and interestingly, introducing a new color of robot removed shooter bias tendencies entirely. However, varying the anthropomorphism of the robots did not moderate the level of shooter bias, and contrary to our expectations, the robots were not perceived by the participants as having different levels of anthropomorphism.