In the recent edition of MRSS, Prof. Kirk Kristofferson delivered his talk on “Robots in the Marketplace: When Do Consumers Antagonize Them and Why”. His presentation shared how consumers often antagonize robots, which are an emerging tech in the marketing and service sector, through negative reviews, vandalism, or hostile behaviour. He presented their experiments which demonstrated how human-like robots receive worse treatment than machine-like robots. A critical insight was that this negative behaviour is driven by “denied humanness” i.e., while human-like robots are initially welcomed due to their familiar appearance, people later tend to dehumanize them once they recognize that these robots are not “truly human”, this mismatch leads to discomfort which in turn fuels their antagonistic reactions. 

A key contribution of the research was finding that social inclusion cues can help reduce this antagonistic behaviour. Through field experiments and mediation analyses, he showed how adding social context and acceptance signals can help mitigate hostility towards human-like robots to some extent. This could prove to be a crucial insight for managers aiming to integrate robots into customer-facing roles.

What resonated with me the most is how this topic connects AI, marketing, and philosophy. Understanding these responses to robots will be key to designing robots and AI systems that are bias-free, robust, and resilient against negative consumer behaviours. In addition, it provides important insight for managers into how certain interventions can help in the smoother inclusion of robots in the service sector. It also highlights how humans have this sense of uniqueness, making their moral concern towards robots conditional and fragile.