When employees mistreat service robots: Customer moral reactions, behavioral contagion, and service provider evaluation

초록

Service robots are increasingly visible in frontline service encounters, yet little is known about how customers respond when they observe employees mistreating these robots. This research examines employee robot mistreatment as a socially visible cue that can simultaneously trigger moral condemnation and behavioral permission. Across five studies, including controlled experiments, a moderated mediation experiment, video- based experiments, behavioral proxy measures, and a matched employee–customer field study, we develop and test a dual-path framework. The findings show that observing employee robot mistreatment elicits moral outrage and, in some contexts, empathy toward the robot, which reduce evaluations of the service provider. At the same time, the same observed mistreatment increases customers’ own willingness to mistreat the robot by weakening perceived injunctive norms regarding appropriate robot treatment. This norm-based contagion pro- cess extends to behavioral proxy outcomes, including robot-directed rude feedback and disrespectful robot- instruction choices. The findings further show that robot anthropomorphism attenuates the erosion of perceived injunctive norms, whereas customer moral identity weakens the translation of weakened norms into mistreatment intentions. The matched field study provides evidence consistent with the proposed framework while showing that the empathy pathway is more context-sensitive than the moral outrage and norm-based pathways. By demonstrating that customers may morally condemn employee robot mistreatment while becoming more behaviorally permissive toward mistreating the robot themselves, this research advances a so- cially situated account of service robot mistreatment in consumer service settings.

키워드