Human prejudice to the healthcare social robot and the impact of human personality: an experiment of the online mental counseling

Robots have vastly influenced the healthcare practices. Ample studies have investigated the use of industrial robots, while leaving social robots an under-explored area. This research investigates human’s prejudicial attitude on the social robots that conduct online mental counseling services. 80 participants are recruited, who have been told to receive counseling services either delivered by a human counselor or a robotic counselor. Given that the actual counseling services are all completed by the same human profession with carefully maintained quality consistency, the participants’ diverged counseling satisfaction becomes a substantial proxy for their prejudiced attitudes on the robotic counselor. With significant lower counseling satisfaction, participants in the robot group particularly show bias on the "helpfulness", "support", and "inclusion" of counseling services. Furthermore, the personality trait of “openness” is found to significantly narrow the magnitude of human bias on social robot. Overall, this research contributes profound insights to post-Covid healthcare research and practices.