April 2026
Scientific American recently interviewed Assistant Professor Jessica Barfield and co-author Jiangen He on their research regarding whether human racial biases are projected onto robots. The following article highlights the methods and findings of their recent paper (also co-authored by Wanqi Zhang) titled "Why That Robot? A Qualitative Analysis of Justification Strategies for Robot Color Selection Across Occupational Contexts."
“Assigning appearance to a social robot is never a purely aesthetic choice,” He, Zhang and Barfield wrote in a paper posted to the preprint server arXiv.org that further details the study. “It is a profound socio-technical intervention requiring intentional ethical design.”