New measurement of psychological safety for humanoid

Abstract

In this article, we aim to discover the important factors for determining the psychological safety of humanoids and to develop a new psychological scale to measure the degree of safety quantitatively. To discover the factors that determine the psychological safety of humanoids from an ordinary person's perspective, we studied 919 Japanese, who observed movies of 11 humanoids and then freely described their impressions about what the safety of each humanoid was for them. Five psychologists categorized all of the obtained descriptions into several categories and then used the categories to compose a new psychological scale. Then, 2,624 different Japanese evaluated the same 11 humanoids using the new scale. Factor analysis on the obtained quantitative data revealed six factors of psychological safety: Performance, Humanness, Acceptance, Harmlessness, Toughness, and Agency. Additional analysis revealed that Performance, Acceptance, Harmlessness, and Toughness were the most important factors for determining the psychological safety of general humanoids. The usability of the new scale is discussed.