Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Ferguson, Melissa

Abstract

This dissertation presents 20 studies (N = 8,595) that focus on how people integrate inconsistent evidence when forming explicit (i.e., directly measured) versus implicit (i.e., indirectly measured) competence impressions of robots. It documents our attempts to understand explicit and implicit impressions’ sensitivity to counterattitudinal evidence, capacity to update, and susceptibility to pragmatic inferences. Although implicit impressions initially appeared insensitive to the robot’s inconsistent “oddball” performances (Chapter 2), subsequent experiments revealed implicit impressions can rapidly update when a single oddball provides sufficiently strong evidence of the robot’s true capabilities (Chapter 3). Furthermore, we found that explicit impressions’ sensitivity to relatively weak evidence appears to result from pragmatic demands inherent in direct, self-report measures, rather than fundamental differences in the underlying cognitive processes (Chapter 4). Collectively, this investigation challenges traditional dual-process theories of implicit social cognition and contributes to our understanding of human-robot collaboration.

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