Robots or humans for disaster response? Impact on consumer prosociality and possible explanations
研究发现，强调机器人在灾难响应中的帮助（相对于人类）会降低消费者的亲社会行为，如捐赠衣物，原因是机器人被认为缺乏勇气，从而减少了激励感。
Abstract Hurricanes, wildfires, pandemics, and other disasters have taken millions of lives in the past few years and caused substantial economic losses. To tackle these extraordinary circumstances, governments, organizations, and companies seek assistance from both humans and high‐technology machines such as robots. This research report documents how highlighting robots' (vs. humans') helping behaviors in disaster response can affect consumers' prosociality, explores driving mechanisms, and tests solutions. Study 1 found that consumers donated fewer items of clothing after watching news highlighting robots' (vs. humans') assistance in a mudslide disaster. Featuring the COVID‐19 pandemic, Study 2 further showed that this decrease in prosociality occurred because reading about robots' assistance felt less encouraging/inspiring to consumers. Studies 3A‐3C (and a supplemental study) explored multiple mechanisms and identified a key driver for the backfire effect—a lower perception of courage in disaster response robots. Accordingly, Study 4 tested three theory‐driven solutions to raise the perceived courage in robots to increase consumer prosociality.