Malene Flensborg Damholdt is a psychologist and an associate professor at the Department of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University. Her research focuses on the effect of individual differences on human-robot interactions, interdisciplinary methodology and development of new research methods in robotics.
Christina Vestergaard is a postdoctoral at the Department of Philosophy and the History of Ideas, University of Aarhus. She is an anthropologist with research interests is interdisciplinary methodology, anthropology of technology, and robo-philosophy.
Johanna Seibt is professor for philosophy at the Department for Philosphy and the History of Ideas at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her current research interests are in process ontology and philosophy of technology with focus on the ontology of social robotics. She coordinates the interdisciplinary Research Unit for Robophilosophy and Integrative Social Robotics (www.integrativerobotics.org) where Humanities expertise is integrated into the development of social robotics applications. She co-edited Sociality and Normativity for Robots—Philosophical Perspectives (Springer 2017) and Robophilosophy—Philosophy of, for, and by Social Robotics (MIT Press, forthcoming).
Gender ascription to robots may lead to willingly or inadvertently repeating gender stereotypes. To reduce this risk, it is important to delineate how gender is spontaneously assigned to robots. The present study explores spontaneous ascription of gender to a social robot with minimal visual gender cues. A total of N=63 participants partook and were engaged in interaction with the robot for 45-50 minutes. The majority (n=36) ascribed gender to the robot, mainly based on voice. The remaining participants still assigned mental capacities to the robot. The implications of the results are discussed.