Development of a psychological scale for general impressions of humanoid

This study identifies the basic perspectives that ordinary people use to evaluate humanoids (Study 1) and develops a new psychological scale to quantify general impressions toward humanoids based on these basic perspectives (Study 2). Then we investigate the effect of the attributes of humans (sex and age) on evaluations of humanoid using the scale (Study 3). Study 1 used 11 humanoids and collected data from 919 Japanese people. People described their natural impressions about the robots in free text. Descriptions are categorized into several groups and the items of the scale are made based on the descriptions. In Study 2, 2624 Japanese 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 Agency. The factor structure is clear and its reliability as a psychological scale is satisfactorily high. Study 3 reveals that effect of sex and age relate to evaluations of humanoid such as middle-aged and older females tend to rate Familiarity and Humanness of all humanoids higher. We discuss usability of the scale.