Social Robots That Curse: Why and How to Study Them

The robots that share our public spaces today are so demure. Social robots and service robots aim to avoid offense, erring toward polite airs, positive emotions, and obedience. In some ways, this makes sense—would you really want to have a yelling match with a delivery robot in a hotel? Probably not, even if you’re in New York City and trying to absorb the local culture.

In other ways, this passive social robot design aligns with paternalistic standards that link assistance to subservience. Thoughtlessly following such outdated social norms in robot design may be ill-advised, since it can help to reinforce outdated or harmful ideas such as restricting people’s rights and reflecting only the needs of majority-identity users.

In my robotics lab at Oregon State University, we work with a playful spirit and enjoy challenging the problematic norms that are entrenched within “polite” interactions and social roles. So we decided to experiment with robots that use foul language around humans. After all, many people are using foul language more than ever in 2025. Why not let robots have a chance, too?

Why and How to Study Cursing Robots

Societal standards in the United States suggest that cursing robots would likely rub people the wrong way in most contexts, as swearing has a predominantly negative connotation. Although some past research shows that cursing can enhance team cohesion and elicit humor, certain members of society (such as women) are often expected to avoid risking offense through profanity. We wondered whether cursing robots would be viewed negatively, or if they might perhaps offer benefits in certain situations.

We decided to study cursing robots in the context of responding to mistakes. Past work in human-robot interaction has already shown that responding to error (rather than ignoring it) can help robots be perceived more positively in human-populated spaces, especially in the case of personal and service robots. And one study found that compared to other faux pas, foul language is more forgivable in a robot.

With this past work in mind, we generated videos with three common types of robot failure: bumping into a table, dropping an object, and failing to grasp an object. We crossed these situations with three types of responses from the robot: no verbal reaction, a non-expletive verbal declaration, and an expletive verbal declaration. We then asked people to rate the robots on things like competence, discomfort, and likability, using standard scales in an online survey.

What If Robots Cursed? These Videos Helped Us Learn How People Feel about Profane RobotsVideo: Naomi Fitter

What People Thought of Our Cursing Robots

On the whole, we were surprised by how acceptable swearing seemed to the study participants, especially within an initial group of Oregon State University students, but even among the general public as well. Cursing had no negative impact, and even some positive impacts, among the college students after we removed one religiously connotated curse (god***it), which seemed to be received in a stronger negative way than other cuss words.

In fact, university participants rated swearing robots as the most socially close and most humorous, and rated non-expletive and expletive robot reactions equivalent on social warmth, competence, discomfort, anthropomorphism, and likability scales. The general public judged non-profane and profane robots as equivalent on most scales, although expletive reactions were deemed most discomforting and non-expletive responses seemed most likable. We believe that the university students were slightly more accepting of cursing robots because of the campus’s progressive culture, where cursing is considered a peccadillo.

Related: What’s the Deal With Robot Comedy?

Since experiments run solely in an online setting do not always represent real-life interactions well, we also conducted a final replication study in person with a robot that made errors while distributing goodie bags to campus community members at Oregon State, which reinforced our prior results.

Humans React to a Cursing Robot in the WildVideo: Naomi Fitter

We have submitted this work, which represents a well-designed series of empirical experiments with interesting results and replications along the way, to several different journals and conferences. Despite consistently enthusiastic reviewer comments, no editors have yet accepted our work for publication—it seems to be the type of paper that editors are nervous to touch. Currently, the work is under review for a fourth time, for possible inclusion in the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), in a paper titled “Oh F**k! How Do People Feel About Robots That Leverage Profanity?”

Give Cursing Robots a Chance

Based on our results, we think cursing robots deserve a chance! Our findings show that swearing robots would typically have little downside and some upside, especially in open-minded spaces such as university campuses. Even for the general public, reactions to errors with profanity yielded much less distaste than we expected. Our data showed that people cared more about whether robots acknowledged their error at all than whether or not they swore.

People do have some reservations about cursing robots, especially when it comes to comfort and likability, so thoughtfulness may be required to apply curse words at the right time. For example, just as humans do, robots should likely hold back their swear words around children and be more careful in settings that typically demand cleaner language. Robot practitioners might also consider surveying individual users about profanity acceptance as they set up new technology in personal settings—rather than letting robotic systems learn the hard way, perhaps alienating users in the process.

As more robots enter our day-to-day spaces, they are bound to make mistakes. How they react to these errors is important. Fundamentally, our work shows that people prefer robots that notice when a mistake has occurred and react to this error in a relatable way. And it seems that a range of styles in the response itself, from the profane to the mundane, can work well. So we invite designers to give cursing robots a chance!