Society's increasing reliance on robots in everyday life provides exciting opportunities for social psychologists to work with engineers in the nascent field of social robotics. In contrast to industrial robots that, for example, may be used on an assembly line, social robots are designed specifically to interact with humans and/or other robots. People tend to perceive social robots as autonomous and capable of having a mind. As such, they are also more likely to be subject to social categorization by humans. As social robots become more human like, people may also feel greater empathy for them and treat robots more like (human) ingroup members. On the other hand, as they become more human like, robots also challenge our human distinctiveness, threaten our identity, and elicit suspicion about their ability to deceive us with their human-like qualities. We review relevant research to explore this apparent paradox, particularly from an intergroup relations perspective. We discuss these findings and propose three research questions that we believe social psychologists are ideally suited to address.

中文翻译：

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“危险，威尔·鲁滨逊！” 社会机器人对群体间关系的挑战

社会在日常生活中对机器人的依赖日益增加，为社会心理学家与新兴的社会机器人领域的工程师合作提供了令人兴奋的机会。与例如可以在流水线上使用的工业机器人相反，社交机器人专门设计用于与人和/或其他机器人进行交互。人们倾向于将社交机器人视为自主的并且具有头脑。因此，它们也更可能受到人类的社会分类。随着社交机器人变得更像人类，人们也可能会对他们产生更大的同情心，并将机器人更像（人类）群体成员一样对待。另一方面，随着机器人变得更像人类，机器人也挑战了我们的人类特色，威胁了我们的身份，并怀疑他们以人性化的特质欺骗我们的能力。我们审查相关的研究，以探索这种明显的悖论，尤其是从群体间关系的角度。我们讨论了这些发现，并提出了三个我们认为社会心理学家非常适合解决的研究问题。