Research On The Impact Of Social Crowding On Consumer Avoidance Of Service Robots

Service robots are quietly entering the daily life of consumers.With their high information integration capabilities,constant cloud data capabilities,and low cost of placement and maintenance,they are becoming more and more favored by managers of public places such as government offices,large shopping places,etc.The arrival of the Covid-19 epidemic has made the restrictions on human-to-human contact more stringent than before,and the resulting psychological effects have already had a new impact on consumer psychology,which,in turn,highlights the huge application value of service robots as an subsitute device for manual service.However,there still exists some problems in the use of service robots in offline consumption scenarios.In many large shaopping malls,consumers are not even willing to resort to service robots,which not only does not relieve the work pressure of service personnel,but even to some extent reduces the shopping satisfaction of consumers,which is undoubtedly contrary to the original intention of the shopping mall managers.In the past literatures,few scholars have discussed thoroughly the impact of specific situational factors on the effect of human-computer interaction,especially in the complex and changeable environment of shopping malls,and few scholars have explored consumers’ characteristics and willingness to interact with service robots.Therefore,this thesis will construct a theoretical model based on avoidance behavior of service robots under the specific consumption situation of offline supermarkets,and analyze its mechanism and boundary conditions,so as to provide theoretical and practical references for the application of service robots.This paper firstly combs the literature to clarify the relevant research concepts,summarize the research context and overall characteristics of the past literatures,and combine the specific issues concerned by this thesis to propose a mechanism model of the impact of social crowding on consumers’ avoidance of service robots,and take anthropomorphism of robots and self-construction as the moderation variables,as well as perceived behavioral control as the mediating mechanism.Then,two groups of studies including four sub-studies were designed to preliminarily verify the model hypothesis,and the robustness of the results was tested by using the clustered robust standard errors and the introduction of instrumental variables into the model.The final conclusions are as follows:(1)Consumers tend to avoid interacting with service robots in crowded situations;(2)The mechanism of such avoidance lies in that social crowding leads to the decline of consumers’ perceived behavior control over robots,and the decline in the sense of control leads to consumers’ reluctance to interact with robots;(3)Compared with independent individuals,the perceived behavioral control of dependent individuals declined more significantly in the crowded situation;(4)Compared with the low degree of anthropomorphism,when service robots manifest high degree of anthropomorphism characteristics,the social crowding environment will significantly reduce the perceived behavior control of consumers..According to the research conclusions,this paper obtains the following management inspirations:(1)Service robots should be placed in open places with low personnel density,which truly fits the original intention of "replacing people with machines" and improves the efficiency of solving problems for consumers;(2)The service robots of large shopping malls should adopt service robots with simple operation and low degree of anthropomorphism.By ensuring consumers’ sense of control,they should enhance their willingness to interact with robots.