Oh F**k! How Do People Feel about Robots that Leverage Profanity?

TL;DR

This study explores how humans perceive robots that use profanity in error situations, revealing that in the U.S., people may find cursing robots relatable and humorous, challenging traditional polite robot norms.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that profanity in robots can positively influence social perceptions, a novel approach in robot behavior design.

Findings

Verbal acknowledgment of errors is generally appreciated.

Few significant differences between non-expletive and expletive responses.

Many users may find cursing robots relatable and humorous.

Abstract

Profanity is nearly as old as language itself, and cursing has become particularly ubiquitous within the last century. At the same time, robots in personal and service applications are often overly polite, even though past work demonstrates the potential benefits of robot norm-breaking. Thus, we became curious about robots using curse words in error scenarios as a means for improving social perceptions by human users. We investigated this idea using three phases of exploratory work: an online video-based study (N = 76) with a student pool, an online video-based study (N = 98) in the general U.S. population, and an in-person proof-of-concept deployment (N = 52) in a campus space, each of which included the following conditions: no-speech, non-expletive error response, and expletive error response. A surprising result in the outcomes for all three studies was that although verbal acknowledgment of an error was typically beneficial (as expected based on prior work), few significant differences appeared between the non-expletive and expletive error acknowledgment conditions (counter to our expectations). Within the cultural context of our work, the U.S., it seems that many users would likely not mind if robots curse, and may even find it relatable and humorous. This work signals a promising and mischievous design space that challenges typical robot character design.