Gender and degree of rational thinking of humans in Entertainment Robot Acceptance
(A2021-93371)

AUTHORS

Rubén Huertas-Garcia, University of Barcelona – UB; Santiago Forgas-Coll , University of Barcelona; Antonio Andriella, Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial CSIC-UPC; Guillem Alenyà , Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial CSIC-UPC

ABSTRACT

Over the last decade, the use of social robots in health and elderly care centres has grown steadily. For this reason, producers and distributors are interested in knowing the acceptance of social robots, as company and entertainment agents, in other contexts such as the tourism industry or at home. In this study, based on classical technology acceptance models, a parsimonious model is proposed to estimate the intention to use social robots in an entertainment context. Moreover, it also analyses how gender and consumers’ degree of rationality condition the antecedents of intention to use. Although findings show that differences in reasoning system are somewhat less explanatory than gender, significant differences persist between genders and degrees of reasoning in the factors that explain consumers’ intention to use social robots.