“I Have to Praise You Like I Should?” The Effects of Implicit Self-Theories and Robot-Delivered Praise on Evaluations of a Social Robot

Recent research suggests that implicit self-theories—a theory predicated on the idea that people’s underlying beliefs about whether self-attributes, such as intelligence, are malleable (incremental theory) or unchangeable (entity theory), can influence people’s perceptions of emerging social robots developed for everyday use. Other avenues of research have identified a close link between ability and effort-focused praise and the promotion of individual implicit self-theories. In line with these findings, we posit that implicit self-theories and robot-delivered praise can interactively influence the way people evaluate a social robot, after a challenging task. Specifically, we show empirically that those endorsing more of an entity theory, indicate more favorable responses to a robot that delivers ability praise than to one that delivers effort praise. In addition, we show that those endorsing more of an incremental theory, remain largely unaffected by either praise type, and instead evaluate a robot favorably regardless of the praise it delivers. Together, these findings expand the state-of-the-art, by providing evidence of an interactive match between implicit self-theories and ability, and effort-focused praise in the context of a human-robot interaction.