Cultural Values, but not Nationality, Predict Social Inclusion of Robots

Research highlighted that Western and Eastern cultures differ in socio-cognitive mechanisms, such as social inclusion. Interestingly, social inclusion is a phenomenon that might transfer from human-human to human-robot relationships. Although the literature has shown that individual attitudes towards robots are shaped by cultural background, little research has investigated the role of cultural differences in the social inclusion of robots. In the present experiment, we investigated how cultural differences, in terms of nationality and individual cultural stance, influence social inclusion of the humanoid robot iCub, in a modified version of the Cyberball game, a classical experimental paradigm measuring social ostracism and exclusion mechanisms. Moreover, we investigated whether the individual tendency to attribute intentionality towards robots modulates the degree of inclusion of the iCub robot during the Cyberball game. Results suggested that the individuals’ stance towards collectivism and tendency to attribute a mind to robots both predicted the level of social inclusion of the iCub robot in our version of the Cyberball game.