Comparison of Attitudes Towards Robots of Different Population Samples in Norway

Abstract

Acceptance of robots is known to be directly influenced by perceptions and attitudes potential users have of them. Particularly, negative attitudes can prevent that the implementations of robots unlock their full potential and ultimately fail if negative attitudes are not addressed. We employed the popular Negative Attitude Towards Robots Scale (NARS) across four different studies to assess how different populations in Norway perceive robots. All four included exposure to at least a robot. However, the setup of each individual study was different from the others. We summarized the results across study and made comparisons between the different samples. We also analyzed the effect of gender and age on attitude towards robots as measured by the NARS. The results indicate that there are significant differences between samples and that females score significantly higher than males, thus having a less favorable opinion of robots and potentially avoiding interaction with them. We touch upon possible explanations and implications of our results and highlight the need for more research into this topic.