Arousing Morale Or Passive Avoidance? Influence Of Intelligent Robot Winning Competition On Consumers' Willingness To Participate In Competition Projects

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology,intelligent robots appear more and more in people's lives,and in some fields,it has surpassed human beings in performance,such as Go,table tennis,and so on.In the future,with the progress of science and technology,intelligent robots will surpass human beings in more and more fields,which may become the norm.Previous studies have shown that intelligent robots can make consumers feel threatened and disgusted.So,for those areas where intelligent robots surpass human beings in performance,will people be more willing to participate in projects in this field based on a competitive mentality,or will they have a negative mentality and will not participate in projects in this field? Take Go as an example,when the Go robot "Alpha Go " defeats Go champion Kejie,are parents more willing to send their children to learn Go,or are they more reluctant to send them to learn Go? This problem is not only related to the design of the intelligent robot,the marketing strategy of intelligent robot enterprise but also related to the continuation of the human cultural treasure project.At present,the research in the field of intelligent robots mainly focuses on people's attitude and willingness to use the intelligent robot and lacks the research on the spillover effect brought by the powerful intelligent robot.Based on Expectancy-value Theory,this paper reveals the influence mechanism of intelligent robots defeating humans on people's willingness to participate in the project through three studies.The main contents and conclusions of the three studies are as follows:Study 1: revealing the main effect-intelligent robots winning the competition will harm people's willingness to participate in the project.This part of the research is divided into two perspectives: one is that the individual as a participant loses to the intelligent robot in the competition(Experiment 1a,1b);the other is that the individual as a spectator sees the intelligent robot win the human champion in the competition(Experiment 2).From the results,whether as a participant or a spectator,the intelligent robot winning the competition will negatively affect consumers' willingness to participate in the competition,which is manifested in the decrease of their interest in the project,the decrease in the willingness to participate in the competition again,the more negative attitude towards whether the human players should continue to practice the competition,and no longer willing to sign up to learn the project.This effect is not affected by gender.Study 2: testing the mediating effect-chance to win leads to people's lower willingness to participate in the projects that intelligent robots win the competition.This part of the research is divided into two parts.In the first part,we use two pretests to preliminarily prove that when the human player loses to the intelligent robot,the individual will talk more about the chance to win and think it is less likely chance to defeat the intelligent robot compared with losing to human.In the second part,the mediating role of sense of odds was confirmed from the perspectives of participants(Experiment 3)and spectators(Experiments 4 and 5),and two possible alternative explanations of negative emotion and sense of the importance of competition were excluded.Study 3: identifying the moderating effect – the purpose of participating in the competition(competition vs.entertainment)and the purpose of the competition(to help human progress vs.publicize the opponent's ability)moderate the negative impact of intelligent robot winning the competition on people's willingness to participate in the project.This part is divided into two perspectives of competition participants and organizers to identify variables that reduce the negative impact of intelligent robots in winning the competition.From the results,when participating in the competition is for entertainment(vs.competition),it can reduce the negative impact of intelligent robots winning the competition on the participants' willingness to participate in the project(Experiment 6);when the competition is held to help humans progress(vs.publicize the opponent's ability),which can reduce the negative impact of intelligent robots on the willingness to participate in the competition project(Experiment 7).This research explores the first-time consumers' willingness to participate in competitions when intelligent robots surpass humans in performance.In theory,first of all,unlike previous researches on consumer behavior in the field of artificial intelligence,which mainly focused on people's attitudes and willingness to use intelligent robots,this research examines the influence of intelligent robots overcoming humans on consumers' willingness to participate in competitions and expands consumer behavior research in the field of artificial intelligence study;Secondly,this research takes intelligent robots as the research object,and expands the research in the field of competition by introducing new types of competition participants;Third,this research reveals the underlying mechanism of the chance to win based on the expected-value theory and extends the application field of the goal pursuit theory.In practice,the conclusions of this research can provide enlightenment for government departments to correctly understand and guide the development of artificial intelligence in the civilian field,intelligent robot companies to formulate product promotion strategies and assume corporate social responsibility,and consumers to treat artificial intelligence correctly.