  Previous research found that robots should best be designed to fit their
given task, whilst others identified gender effects in people's evaluations of
robots. This study combines this knowledge to investigate stereotyping effects
of robot genderedness and assigned tasks in an online experiment (n = 89)
manipulating robot gender (male vs. female) and task type (analytical vs.
social) in a between subject's design in terms of trust, social perception, and
humanness. People deem robots more competent and have higher trust in their
capacity when they perform analytical tasks compared to social tasks,
independent of the robot's gender. Furthermore, we observed a trend in the data
indicating that people seem to dehumanize female robots (regardless of task
performed) to animals lacking higher-level mental processes, and additionally
that people seem to dehumanize robots to emotionless objects only when gendered
robots perform tasks contradicting the stereotypes of their gender.

Robotics;Human-Computer Interaction