People's assumptions about robots: investigation of their relationships with attitudes and emotions toward robots

People's assumptions about robots are an important factor affecting their construction and change of attitudes and emotions toward robots. The assumptions should be measured not only to investigate psychological factors determining reactions toward robots but also to study crosscultural attitudes toward robots. As far as measurement of people's attitudes and emotions can contribute to the design of human-robot interaction, questionnaire items measuring assumptions of robots should be prepared. To develop these items measuring individuals' assumptions about robots, a pilot research was administered in Japan. The results implied the possibility that Japanese people assume "humanoids" as a representative robots, though this assumption still remains unconnected to realistic assumptions about situations where and tasks that these robots perform; the classical views of robots that physically act for humans remains. These implications present some problems for the administration of the survey. This paper reports detailed results of the pilot survey, discusses implications of the results and problems with them, and suggests possible future works based on the results.