General Attitudes Towards Robots Scale (GAToRS): A New Versatile Instrument for Social Surveys

Psychometric scales are useful tools in understanding people’s attitudes towards different aspects of life. As societies develop and new technologies arise, new validated scales are needed. Robots and artificial intelligences of various kinds are about to occupy just about every niche in human society. Several tools to measure fears and anxieties about robots do exist, but there is a definite lack of tools to measure hopes and expectations for these new technologies. Here, we cre-ate and validate a novel multi-dimensional scale which measures people’s attitudes towards ro-bots, giving equal weight to positive and negative attitudes. Our scale reliably differentiated a) comfort and enjoyment around robots, b) discomfort and anxiety around robots, c) rational hopes about robots in general and d) rational worries about robots in general. In addition to its psycho-metric qualities our scale is compact (only 20 items), aesthetically pleasing (5 items in each of the four sub-scales) and produces reliably the same factor structure in different samples. In contrast to previous tools our new instrument also allows large-scale population based and intercultural re-search without context dependency. Due to its easy-to-use nature, we hope our scale will be a use-ful instrument for social scientists who wish to study human-technology relations with a validated scale in efficient and generalizable ways.