Who is appropriate? A robot, human and mascot perform three troublesome tasks

We present a study on people´s acceptance of robots performing tasks in a city. Three different entities (a human, a human in the costume of a mascot, and a robot) performed tasks in three different scenarios: endlessly guiding, responding to irrational complaints, and picking an accidentally discarded key out of a trash. All of these tasks involve entities interacting with visitors in situations that are troublesome, i.e. dull, stressful, and dirty, respectively. For this paper, 24 participants watched 9 videos (three tasks performed by three entities) and evaluated the appropriateness of each entity for the task and the human-likeness of the entity. The results indicate that people prefer to have a robot rather than a human perform these troublesome tasks, even though these tasks require much interaction with people. In addition, the comparison with a human in costume enables us to further speculate that people´s expectations of an entity deserving human rights rather than being human-like in appearance or cognitive capability would be a reason for their judgments regarding appropriateness.