Robots in the kitchen: The automation of food preparation in restaurants and the compounding effects of perceived love and disgust on consumer evaluations.

Restaurants are swiftly embracing automation to prepare food, experimenting with innovations from robotic arms for frying foods to pizza-making robots. While these advances promise to enhance efficiency and productivity, their impact on consumer psychology remains largely unexplored. We present four experiments that demonstrate how food service automation leads to negative downstream effects (i.