Examining the elements of the Elaboration Likelihood Model in the light of Uncanny Valley and anthropomorphism in terms of human-robot interaction

With the rapid increase in the use of robots in the public sphere, the study of human-robot interaction is becoming a comprehensive discipline that encourages collaboration between various fields of expertise, covering design and evaluation aspects. Social robots are being used in fields ranging from education to health care, and it is important to understand how humans perceive them and interact with them emotionally and physically. Humans attributing human-like characteristics to robots can lead to both positive and negative human-robot interactions, suggesting that anthropomorphism plays a critical role in the design of robots. For example, the "Uncanny Valley" phenomenon, which causes a feeling of discomfort in humans as the human-like characteristics of robots increase, is a concept that is frequently encountered both in popular culture and in the scientific field. Social influence is a powerful concept that causes individuals to change their attitudes, behaviors and opinions, and persuasion is a central concept of social psychology that focuses on how people process information and change their attitudes. In particular, the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) is a key model in understanding attitude change and describing how it is influenced through two different pathways (central and peripheral). The study investigates the effects of different social agents - human, humanoid, android and cyborg - on the persuasiveness of communicated messages and the attitudes and subjectivity of people towards these agents in the context of robot-human interaction within the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM). The messages were manipulated as logical and non-logical, and were assigned to four different social agents in 8 different groups (2x4). Participants randomly assigned to different groups were exposed to pre-test and post-test questions designed to measure the persuasion difference score and containing 4 different questions both before and after the study. Firstly, necessary descriptive analyses were performed. Then, ANOVA was then conducted to examine the effects of message type and social agent type on participants' persuasion levels. As a result of the analysis, it was found that message type and social agent type did not have a significant effect on the change in persuasion scores; however, variables such as the participant's gender, familiarity with technology, the participant's perception of the physical attractiveness of the messenger, whether the messaging social agent would be preferred in childcare, and the perceived ability of the messaging social agent could be important variables. At the end of the study, possible factors that may affect the results were emphasized.