Cursing Robots: Challenging Norms With Humor

The robots that share our public places today are very discreet. Social robots and Service robots It aims to avoid attack, error towards polite air, positive emotions, and obedience. In some respects, this is logical – you really want to get a screaming match with a Delivery robot In a hotel? Maybe not, even if you are in New York City And try to absorb the local culture.

In other ways, this negative social Robot design It is in line with the parental standards that link the help of services. This may be without thinking after such ancient social standards in the design of the robot is not encouraging, because it is It can help enhance old or harmful ideas Like restricting people’s rights and reflected the needs of majority identity users.

in My robot laboratory at Oregon State Universityand We work with Fun And enjoying the defiance of the problematic standards that are entrenched in “polite” reactions and social roles. So we decided to try robots that use an unpleasant language around humans. After all, many people use a foul than ever in 2025. Why don’t you let robots have a chance either?

Why and how to study robots cursed

Community standards in US I suggested that a cursed robots are likely to rub the wrong people in most contexts, as the right has a negative indication often. Although some previous research shows insulting It can enhance the cohesion of the team and Humor concludedIt is often expected to do some members of society (like women) Avoid risk crime Through profanity. We asked whether robots will be negatively shown, or whether it may provide benefits in certain situations.

We decided to study a curse robots in the context of responding to errors. The previous work in human interaction has already shown this Responding to error (Instead of ignoring them) Robots can help perceive them more positively in the populated spaces, especially in the case of personal robots and service. And one Ticket I found that in comparison with the other Paux PAS, the bad language is more forgiven in a robot.

With this past work in mind, we created videos with three common types of robot failure: climbing to a table, dropping an object, and failing to understand an object. We crossed these situations with three types of responses from robot: there is no verbal reaction, an unequal oral advertisement, and an unspecified oral advertisement. Then we asked people to evaluate robots on things like efficiency, discomfort, and parents, using standard standards in an online survey.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?

What people think about our gentle robots

On the whole, we were surprised by the emergence of the acceptable oath of the study participants, especially in a preliminary set of Oregon State University students, but even among the general public as well. The talkers had no negative impact, and even some positive effects, among university students after we removed one curse from the religious standpoint (God ***), which seemed to receive a negative way stronger than other words.

In fact, the university’s participants classified the right -wing robots The most socially near The most humble spirit, unintended on the imperceptible robot and equivalent to social warmth, efficiency, discomfort, experimental formation, and antiquities standards. The general public ruled on the non -innocent robots and trees as equivalent in most of the standards, although the reactions resulting from what is more upgraded and it seems that the non -transmitted responses appear to be more loved. We believe that university students were a little more acceptable than cursing robots due to the progressive culture of the university campus, as the diaspora is Piccadilo.

Since the experiments that are operated only in an online environment do not always represent the real life interactions well, we also conducted a final recurrence study with a robot that made errors while distributing goodie bags to members of the campus community on the campus to Oregon StateWhich strengthened our previous results.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?

We have presented this work, which represents a well -designed series of experimental experiences with interesting and repeated results along the way, to many different magazines and conferences. Despite constantly enthusiastic auditors’ comments, no editors have accepted our publishing work – it appears to be a kind of paper with which the editors feel communicated. Currently, the work is under review for the fourth time, for its potential listing at the IEEE International Conference of 2025 on robots and human interactive communications (RO-Man), in a paper entitled “entitled”Oh and ** k! How do people feel about robots that benefit from profanity?”

Grant robots cursed the opportunity

Based on our results, we believe that cursed robots deserve an opportunity! The results we find show that the robots that prevent them usually have a negative side and some of the upward trend, especially in open spaces such as universities. Even for the general public, reactions to errors with profanity have resulted in much less than what we expected. Our data showed that people are interested in whether the robots have confessed their mistakes more than whether or not they were.

People have some reservations about robots cursing, especially when it comes to comfort and parents, so it may be needed to think to apply curse in timely. For example, just as humans do, robots are likely to hinder their daily words about children and be more careful in settings that usually require a cleaner language. Android practitioners may also think about surveying individual users about accepting profanity because they have put a new technology in personal settings – instead of allowing automatic systems to learn in the difficult way, and may alienate users in this process.

With more robots entering our daily spaces, errors must be made. How do they interact with these errors are important. Basically, our work shows that people prefer robots that are noticed when an error and interaction with this error in a reliable way. It appears that a group of patterns in the same response, from the professional to secular, can work well. So we invite designers to give robots curse a chance!