The Social Perception of Robots Scale (SPRS): Developing and Testing a Scale for Successful Interaction Between Humans and Robots
Abstract
Robots are increasingly populating social settings. Social robots should elicit positive associations to be accepted and integrated into daily lives. Even though social perception is multi-dimensional, available scales do not adequately picture this complexity in the perception of robots. To develop a new scale, we aggregated data on social perception of robots, initially operationalized as competence, sociability, morality, and anthropomorphism from four prior studies. An exploratory factor analysis on a random sample revealed three factors: “anthropomorphism”, “morality/sociability”, and “activity/cooperation”. To validate these results, we performed confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on the remaining sample and tested for validity and reliability. Reliability was appropriate. We found significant correlations between age, gender, educational level, and factors of the scale. However, missing values interfered with confirmatory and validating analyses. Despite these issues, the scale contributes to future research on social perception of robots.