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Applying the perceived creepiness of technology scale to social robots
Abstract
Designing positive robot experiences requires an understanding of users' perceptions and meeting their needs in an ethical manner. However, despite best intentions, users have strong positive or negative reactions to robots, either finding them ''cute'' or ''creepy''. The Perceived Creepiness of Technology Scale (PCTS) was designed for evaluating how creepy a technology appears to a user on first encounter. In this paper we applied the PCTS to a cross-section of social robots to measure their perceived creepiness and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of PCTS when applied in a Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) context. We demonstrate that while a robot may not be perceived as creepy initially, it can have underlying unethical practices inherent in its design which is not well captured by the PCTS. This emphasises the need for better HRI practices to ensure creepiness is appropriately assessed in the social robot domain.
Type
Conference Contribution
Type of thesis
Series
Citation
Turner, J., Bowen, J., Konig, J., Stawarz, K., & Vanderschantz, N. (2025). Applying the perceived creepiness of technology scale to social robots. ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 1695-1699. https://doi.org/10.1109/HRI61500.2025.10973926
Date
2025
Publisher
IEEE Press
Degree
Supervisors
Rights
This is an accepted version of a conference presentation published at https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3721488.3721747 ©2025 IEEE