Recently, the work "Exploring the effect of humor in robot failure" jointly completed by the doctoral student Yang Hongyan, Professor Xu Hong and their collaborators was accepted and published by Annals of Tourism Research, one of the three top international journals in tourism management. With an impact factor of 9.011, the journal is one of the three Class A journals in the field of tourism management with 4 stars from ABS and FMS Tourism Management.

 

The paper explores whether, and when, humor can mitigate the negative effects of robot service failures as a remedy. Combining benign conflict theory and conditioning focus theory, this study finds that in the low severity failure situation, the robot's humorous response will cause higher humor appreciation and thus generate positive customer evaluation. In a high-severity failure situation, the robot's humorous response will lead to a higher sense of insincerity, which in turn leads to a more negative customer evaluation. In addition, this study also explores the moderating effect of the degree of anthropomorphism of the robot.

 

（Translator：ZHANG Beile，Proofreading：ZHANG Junjiao）