Abstract

Despite the growing body of research exploring consumer responses to robotics, the existing comprehension of this topic locates mainly on consumers’ post-interaction reactions to robots based on technology-related and service-related views, leaving the complexity of pre-interaction uninvestigated. Motivated by a scarcity of knowledge on consumers’ reactions to service robots before their actual interaction, this study disentangles how perceived comfort with robots, as a pre-interaction perception triggered by robot anthropomorphism, penetrates customers’ implicit social decision-making and affects customer responses. By a large-scale scenario-based experiment, this study allocated a fine-grained spectrum of anthropomorphism and cartographically delineated the UV-resemblance effect of anthropomorphism degree on perceived comfort of robots and trust. Furthermore, our study reveals the role of human-robot trust in mediating the relationship between comfort with robots and usage intention. The findings provide tools for future studies into understanding pre-interaction responses from social-psychological elements that could inform the design of socially competent robots.

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