Attitudes toward robots – fiction or reality?

One challenge to understanding how people think and feel about robots is the wide variety of robotic systems and the general public’s lack of direct contact with them, which leaves open the question of whether people’s attitudes toward robots are shaped by exposure to real robotic systems or not. This thesis presents evidence that people not only internally represent the concept of robots in varied ways but also that such representations may account for some of the reported variability in people’s attitudes toward robots. Chapter 2 presents a systematic review that demonstrated said variability by quantifying people’s attitudes toward social robots and highlighted a number of factors that have arguably not been sufficiently explored in the literature. Namely, the influence of people’s individual representation of robots and the potential impact of fictional and non-fictional depictions of robots on people’s attitudes. Chapter 3 explored both of these factors by presenting a semantic network reflecting the social representation of robots that supported the diversity of individuals’ representations and provided insights into the stable structure of the social representation which was divided into five distinct modules of meaning. These modules were further interrogated in the same chapter via the thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews which demonstrated both the role of fiction in people’s individual representation of robots as well as the impact of said representations on people’s attitudes. In order to investigate the impact of fictional robots on people’s attitudes, three pilot studies that manipulated the perceived fictional status of identical robots through indirect contact were conducted and reported in Chapter 4. The methodology was then implemented in an experimental study that tested whether the perception of the fictionality of the robots had an effect on participants’ attitudes (reported in Chapter 5). Findings showed that when robots are perceived as non-fictional, participants reported more positive explicit (but not implicit) attitudes toward those specific robots and toward robots in general than when the same robots were perceived as fictional. Chapter 5 also describes the findings of a second experimental study that primed participants with images of either fictional or non-fictional representations of robots. Findings supported the preference for non-fictional robots found in the previous study but in this case, there was a change in participants implicit, rather than explicit, attitudes. The implications of these findings are discussed in Chapter 6.