When Robots are Surprising: The Role of Cue Diagnosticity in Judging Robot Competence

Previous research showed people’s explicit (vs. implicit) competence impressions were more sensitive to a robot’s single inconsistent (“oddball”) behavior. We report nine pre-registered studies (N = 3,735 online participants) testing the scope and underlying causes of this dissociation. We found that the dissociation (a) generalized to industrial robots, surgical robots, and self-driving cars; (b) replicated with structurally aligned direct and indirect measures of competence; and (c) is at least partially explained by the inconsistent evidence’s diagnosticity. We discuss implications for social cognition and human-robot interaction.