The role of emotions in the consumer meaning-making of interactions with social robots

The interaction with social robots is supposed to be a unique and emotionally charged activity. Based on the diffusion of innovations literature, subjective feelings represent a driver of the innovation diffusion process. Yet, to date, no study has comprehensively assessed consumers' emotional responses over time to interactions with social robots. Thus, the study aims to address this research gap by combining innovation diffusion and psychology literature. The emotional content of customers' self-reported communication on social robots deployed across international hotels is categorized through Plutchik's wheel of emotions by using advanced text analytics techniques to track and analyze its evolution over time. Findings show that consumers generally express positive emotions towards social robots. Trust, anticipation and joy are the most frequently expressed emotions. Empirical results from multivariate regression analysis indicate that joy has the greatest magnitude and that anticipation and surprise do not significantly influence consumers' opinions and comments. Negative emotions are less frequent but have a significantly negative impact, which might be considered by hotel managers willing to introduce social robots.