Rude Humans and Vengeful Robots: Examining Human Perceptions of Robot Retaliatory Intentions in Professional Settings

Humans and robots are increasingly working in personal and professional settings. In workplace settings, humans and robots may work together as colleagues, potentially leading to social expectations—or violation thereof. Extant research has primarily sought to understand social interactions and expectations in personal rather than professional settings, and none of these studies have examined negative outcomes arising from violations of social expectations (i.e., nonaligned, or unexpected, behaviors). This article reports the results of a 2 × 3 online experiment (human behavior: polite/rude; robot behavior: agreeable/neutral/“retaliatory”) that used a unique “first-person perspective video” to immerse participants in a workplace setting to examine perceptions of appropriate robot responses to human norm violation. The results are nuanced and reveal that while robots are expected to act in accordance with social expectations despite human behavior, there are benefits for robots perceived as “being the bigger person” in the face of human rudeness. Theoretical and practical implications are provided, which discuss the importance of these findings for the design of social robots.