Sexist humour and social identity: The role of sexist humour in men’s ingroup cohesion, sexual harassment, rape proclivity and victim blame

Jokes have been recognised as ways in which negative attitudes and prejudice can be communicated and enacted in hidden ways (e.g., Allport 1954; Freud 2004 [1905]). In this paper, we review the existing literature on the functions and effects of sexist humour, using Martineau’s (1972) model on the social functions of humour as well as Tajfel and Turner’s (2004 [1986]) Social Identity Theory (SIT) and Turner et al.’s (1987) Self Categorisation Theory. Within these frameworks, we particularly focus on sex as an intergroup context and on the way sexist humour functions to a) enhance male ingroup cohesion (sexist humour as a predictor) b) serves as a form of sexual harassment (sexist humour as an outcome) and c) amplifies self-reported rape proclivity and victim blame (sexist humour as a moderator). The paper concludes by highlighting gaps in the existing literature and providing directions for future research

A robot at home – How affect, technology commitment, and personality traits influence user experience in an intelligent Robotics Apartment

Bernotat J, Eyssel FA. A robot at home – How affect, technology commitment, and personality traits influence user experience in an intelligent Robotics Apartment. In: Proceedings of the 26th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN). 2017: 641-646

Auditory gaydar: perception of sexual orientation based on female voice

We investigated auditory gaydar (i.e., the ability to recognize sexual orientation) in female speakers, addressing three related issues: whether auditory gaydar is (1) accurate, (2) language-dependent (i.e., occurs only in some languages, but not in others), and (3) ingroup-specific (i.e., occurs only when listeners judge speakers of their own language, but not when they judge foreign language speakers). In three experiments, we asked Italian, Portuguese, and German participants (total N = 466) to listen to voices of Italian, Portuguese, and German women, and to rate their sexual orientation. Our results showed that auditory gaydar was not accurate; listeners were not able to identify speakers’ sexual orientation correctly. The same pattern emerged consistently across all three languages and when listeners rated foreign-language speakers.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Can(’t) wait to have a robot at home? – Japanese and German users’ attitudes toward service robots in smart homes

Bernotat J, Eyssel FA. Can(’t) wait to have a robot at home? – Japanese and German users’ attitudes toward service robots in smart homes. In: Proceedings of the 27th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN). 2018: 15-22

Pay Them No Mind: the Influence of Implicit and Explicit Robot Mind Perception on the Right to be Protected

Mind perception is a fundamental part of anthropomorphism and has recently been suggested to be a dual process. The current research studied the influence of implicit and explicit mind perception on a robot’s right to be protected from abuse, both in terms of participants condemning abuse that befell the robot as well as in terms of participants’ tendency to humiliate the robot themselves. Results indicated that acceptability of robot abuse can be manipulated through explicit mind perception, yet are inconclusive about the influence of implicit mind perception. Interestingly, explicit attribution of mind to the robot did not make people less likely to mistreat the robot. This suggests that the relationship between a robot’s perceived mind and right to protection is far from straightforward, and has implications for researchers and engineers who want to tackle the issue of robot abuse

Theory and Practice of Sociosensitive and Socioactive Systems

Interactive adaptive systems increasingly become part of our everyday life. Which factors could shape this development and under which conditions will interactions with technical systems be deemed socially appropriate? The "FActors of Social Appropriateness" (FASA) Model presented in this Open Access-book provides a structured approach to our understanding of social appropriateness in human-technology interaction. The FASA Model serves to inform design choices for sociosensitive and socioactive artificial assistants

People Interpret Robotic Non-linguistic Utterances Categorically

We present results of an experiment probing whether adults exhibit categorical perception when affectively rating robot-like sounds (Non-linguistic Utterances). The experimental design followed the traditional methodology from the psychology domain for measuring categorical perception: stimulus continua for robot sounds were presented to subjects, who were asked to complete a discrimination and an identification task. In the former subjects were asked to rate whether stimulus pairs were affectively different, while in the latter they were asked to rate single stimuli affectively. The experiment confirms that Non-linguistic Utterances can convey affect and that they are drawn towards prototypical emotions, confirming that people show categorical perception at a level of inferred affective meaning when hearing robot-like sounds. We speculate on how these insights can be used to automatically design and generate affect-laden robot-like utterances

We share the euro, but not our humanity: Humanity attributions are associated with the perceived causes, consequences, and solution to the Greek financial crisis

Political and financial crises are complex and multi-determined situations whose solutions depend on multiple factors. To understand these conflicts, we explore to what extent mutual outgroup dehumanization along with ingroup humanization between the parts involved in the conflict predict the interpretation of the different facets of the political situation (i.e. interpretation of the crisis, the perceived consequences, or the possible solutions). In this article, we focused on the dispute between Germany and Greece catalyzed by a Greek referendum in 2015. We assessed to what extent mutual (de)humanization between Germans and Greeks predicted the interpretation of the conflict. Our results showed a mutual dehumanization: Greeks mechanizing Germans and Germans animalizing Greeks. For Germans, dehumanizing the Greeks was linked to worse perceived Greek financial administration and minimizing the perception of the Greeks’ suffering, whereas humanizing the ingroup was associated with more outgroup responsibility. For Greeks, dehumanizing the Germans was associated with a desire to avoid German financial control, whereas ingroup humanization was associated with better financial administration, less responsibility, and a higher perception of suffering among Greeks. In short, dehumanizing the other members of the European Union (EU) while humanizing their own nationality contributed to the neglect of the problems inside the EU, shaping the understanding of the economic conflict among both nations

Shape it – The influence of robot body shape on gender perception in robots

Bernotat J, Eyssel FA, Sachse J. Shape it – The influence of robot body shape on gender perception in robots. In: Kheddar A, Yoshida E, Ge SS, et al., eds. Social Robotics. 9th International Conference, ICSR 2017, Tsukuba, Japan, November 22-24, 2017, Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence. Vol 10652. Cham: Springer; 2017: 75-84