This study examines how robot-related social and humanlike cues shape consumers' perceived morality and perceived ethics of service robots, and how these appraisals impact trust and intention to use.
A total of 257 usable surveys were collected from diners who have engaged with a service robot at a fine dining restaurant. The data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).
A robot's perceived mind of its own and social presence significantly influenced consumers' perceived morality and perceived ethics. Perceived ethics and social presence significantly influenced trust, while perceived morality and mind of its own exhibited nonsignificant effects on trust. Trust strongly predicted intention to use. Mediation analysis confirmed the intermediary effects of trust between social presence, perceived ethics and intention to use.
The findings suggest that managers should balance robot autonomy with predictability, prioritize ethical transparency over simulated moral reasoning, design social presence carefully and treat trust-building as an operational process involving reliability, service recovery and escalation protocols.
The study contributes to service robot research by distinguishing perceived morality as consumers' attribution of moral capacity from perceived ethics as consumers' evaluation of ethical conduct. It further shows that moral and ethical appraisals do not translate into trust in identical ways, highlighting the need to understand service robot acceptance through moral cognition, ethical evaluation and trust formation.
