Korean Students' Attitudes Towards Robots: Two Survey Studies

摘要

This paper is concerned with Korean students' attitudes towards robots, presenting two survey studies. The first study was concerned with a group of college students, taking the perspective of international comparison. Data were collected by administering an online survey, where 106 volunteer students had participated. In the survey, the Negative Attitude towards Robot Scale(NARS) was adopted to compare the Korean students' scores with those of multi-national groups (U.S.A, Germany, Netherland, Japan, Mexico, and China) who responded to the same scale in Bartneck et al.'s research. The analysis of the data reveals that Korean students tend to be more concerned about social impacts that robots might bring to future society and are very conscious about the uncertain influences of robots on human life. The second study investigated factors that may affect K-12 students' attitudes towards robots, with survey data garnered from 298 elementary, middle, and high school students. The data were analyzed by the method of multiple regression analysis to test the hypothesis that a student's gender, age, the extent of interest in robots, and the extent of experiences with robots may influence his or her attitude towards robots. The hypothesis was partially supported in that variables of a student's gender, age, and the extent of interest in robots were statistically significant with regard to the attitude variable. Given the results, this paper suggests three points of discussions to better understand Korean students' attitudes towards robots: social and cultural context, individual differences, and theory of mind.