Anticipated User Stereotypes Systematically Affect the Social Acceptability of Mobile Devices.

Understanding social perception is crucial when designing socially accepted mobile devices. Using the stereotype content model (SCM), recent work showed that mobile devices systematically attract stereotypical users’ warmth and competence. It was concluded that the SCM can predict a device’s social acceptability. There is, however, no empirical evidence for the assumption that the SCM can predict social acceptability and it also unclear what causes a device’s stereotypical perception. In this paper, we first verify that the SCM’s dimensions strongly correlate with social acceptance and show that social acceptance can be explained through stereotypical perception. In a second study, we independently asked participants to assess the warmth and competence of mobile devices, human stereotypes, and the probability that human stereotypes use the devices. We found that warmth and competence of anticipated stereotypical users predict a device’s position in the SCM. The combined results of both studies show that the stereotypical perception of anticipated users can explain the social acceptability of mobile devices.