A psychological scale for general impressions of humanoids

Abstract

This study identifies the basic general perspectives that ordinary people use to evaluate humanoids (Study 1). In addition, it develops a new psychological scale to quantify general impressions regarding humanoids based on these basic perspectives (Study 2). In Study 1, to discover the basic perspectives toward humanoids, we used 11 humanoids and collected data from 919 Japanese people ranging from teenagers to people in their 70s in three big cities. We asked people to describe their impressions in free text about the robots. Five psychologists analyzed the qualitative data to categorize all the descriptions into several categories. Then, we made the items based on the obtained descriptions to construct a new psychological scale for evaluating general impressions regarding humanoids. In Study 2, we asked 2,624 Japanese who did not participate in Study 1 to evaluate 11 humanoids on the developed scale. Factor analysis showed that nine factors should be used for evaluating the general impressions regarding humanoids: Familiarity, Repulsion, Performance, Utility, Motion, Sound, Voice, Humanness, and Entitativity. The factor structure is clear and its reliability as a psychological scale is satisfactorily high. Finally, we discuss the usability of the new scale.