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Service Robots Rising: How Humanoid Robots Influence Service Experiences and Elicit Compensatory Consumer Responses

2019/04/22 by Martin Mende, Maura L. Scott, Jenny van Doorn +2 · 1,143 citations
Neuroscience · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Advertising #Belongingness #Business #Consumption (sociology) #Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior #Marketing #Order (exchange) #Psychology #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Psychology of Social Influence #Purchasing #Service (business) #Service provider #Social psychology #Sociology

paper · open access · doi:10.1177/0022243718822827

published in Journal of Marketing Research 56(4), 535-556 (SAGE Publishing)

openalex publication_date 2019/04/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

Interactions between consumers and humanoid service robots (HSRs; i.e., robots with a human-like morphology such as a face, arms, and legs) will soon be part of routine marketplace experiences. It is unclear, however, whether these humanoid robots (compared with human employees) will trigger positive or negative consequences for consumers and companies. Seven experimental studies reveal that consumers display compensatory responses when they interact with an HSR rather than a human employee (e.g., they favor purchasing status goods, seek social affiliation, and order and eat more food). The authors investigate the underlying process driving these effects, and they find that HSRs elicit greater consumer discomfort (i.e., eeriness and a threat to human identity), which in turn results in the enhancement of compensatory consumption. Moreover, this research identifies boundary conditions of the effects such that the compensatory responses that HSRs elicit are (1) mitigated when consumer-perceived social belongingness is high, (2) attenuated when food is perceived as more healthful, and (3) buffered when the robot is machinized (rather than anthropomorphized).

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