PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The current work investigated the under-researched topic of ambivalent attitudes towards robots from an experimental social psychological perspective. While ambivalence has been a research topic for almost a hundred years, it is often overlooked in the context of attitude research. When an attitude towards an attitude object is not clearly positive or negative, it is often interpreted as neutral. Depending upon the measurement method, ambivalent attitude objects may appear neutral, despite differing in terms of their positive and negative evaluations, their perceived subjective conflict, and the affective, behavioral and cognitive indicators of such conflict. In this work, we apply a theoretical framework, the ABC of Ambivalence (van Harreveld et al., 2015), to the domain of attitudes towards robots and thereby test the external validity of the model as well as enhancing our understanding of attitudes towards robots. In three manuscripts relating to five experiments and data from over 600 participants in total we demonstrated firstly, that attitudes towards robots are highly ambivalent. Secondly, we investigated the evaluation contents and dispositional differences influencing ambivalence towards robots in a mixed methods design. Thirdly, using implicit and explicit measures, we examined the behavioral, and cognitive indicators of ambivalence in attitudes towards robots, providing an updated ABC of Ambivalence, the AB of Robot-related Ambivalence. While self-reported attitudes were consistently highly ambivalent across experiments, the behavioral indicators of such ambivalence seemed to depend upon the type of robot. Further, the current research highlighted boundaries concerning the cognitive indicators of ambivalence, which could not be replicated in the domain of social robotics. Further research is required to investigate the specific cognitive and behavioral indicators of ambivalence. The current work demonstrates a novel interpretation of seemingly “neutral” attitudes towards robots, encouraging researchers to reinterpret and possibly replicate robot related attitude research with the proposed methodology considering attitudinal ambivalence.