MPORTANCE OF CULTURAL INTERFACE IN THE PERCEPTION OF THE SOCIAL ROBOT STATUS AND ROLE

He article discusses the social role and status as components of social interaction of a man and a robot. Any social interaction provides a distribution of social positions of communicants. Typically, these positions are set according to social status and social roles of the participants. If the robot becomes a participant of social interaction, therefore, it gets a social status, fixing for it a set of rules, as well as possible rights and duties. In a communicative situation the role and status cannot be separated, as manifested in the complex that gives reason to call this phenomenon status and role human characteristics. Moreover, if the social roles, typical for the society, are absorbed by a man in the process of socialization, the social robot needs to be artificially generated these characteristics. It should be noted that in a communicative situation they also consist of expectations of the recipient. Thus, the status and role characteristics of a social robot are the result of their artificial formation and expectations of the communicants interacting with it. Possible means of formation of status and role characteristics of a social robot can be linguistic markers, nonverbal elements, functions, rights, duties, etc. Primary index of social status of a man using in identifying the status and role, certainly, is the appearance of an individual. With respect to the robot appearance we call it cultural interface. This article we attempt to determine the significance of cultural interface of the robot in perception of its status and role characteristics. The subject of investigation is the relational dimension status and role characteristics in relation to the recipient in interaction of a man and a robot. As a method of pilot research we selected questionnaires. Respondents were presented 23 full-color images of robots with different types of cultural interfaces. The images were selected with the following criteria: similarity with living beings (android, humanoid, zoomorphic interfaces) and robots without cultural interface (industrial commercial). The questionnaire consists of three sections that identify the data on the perception of status and role characteristics of the robot. In the first section, respondents indicate personal information - gender and age. The second section is devoted to the correlation of the characteristics and associations with respondents suggested images of robots. The questionnaire has keywords-incentives which correlate with the social status and role. In the third section identification of status is determined indirectly by the possible behavioral strategies. Preliminary results of the pilot research showed that almost all respondents endowed the cultural interface robot with the status and role characteristics. Therefore the robots without cultural interface were not endowed with them. The hypothesis about the importance of cultural interface in formation of the social status and role of robots was confirmed. Most respondents endowed the robots with android interface with superior status. It is possible that the similarity of these robots to people makes it easier to integrate them into the social system. The situation of social inequality seems to be possible only with the person that allows the robots with humanoid and android interface to be a participant. For the younger group such robots could be associated with adults who have endowed with a higher status due to their established system of relations. Consequently, android robots were referred to this category by analogy. The robots with zoomorphic interface have been assigned to the lower social status; it can be explained the prevailing anthropocentric view of the ongoing world. Robots with humanoid interface became the most variational social status: they were attributed all possible status and role characteristics. They can be considered as possible universal type of cultural interface. It is important to note that the younger age group doesn’t use lower social status for this type of interface.

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