2026
By Ada Shi
Grounded in evolutionary psychology, this project investigates how humor and communication failure shape people’s perceived warmth and competence of a social robot. Socially interactive robots are entering our schools, hospitals, and homes, but they still make communication errors, which may influence how people perceive them. The MASA paradigm (Lombard & Xu, 2021) explains why people treat media technologies as social actors based on social cues. The Stereotype Content Model (Fiske et al., 2002) frames warmth and competence as the two core dimensions of how people perceive others based on first impressions. This study asks whether those same perceptions extend to social robots when people see them make errors and tell jokes, using a laboratory experiment with the humanoid robot NAO to help us better understand how people embrace these emerging social actors in our societies.