Robots or Humans for Disaster Response? Impact on Consumer Prosociality and Possible Explanations

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.