 Contagious humans: A pandemic's positive effect on attitudes towards care robotsManuela Schönmann, Anja Bodenschatz, Matthias Uhl and Gari Walkowitz Technology in Society, 2024, vol. 76, issue C Abstract: History has shown that attitudes toward new technologies can change abruptly following disruptive events. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became apparent that care robots enable increased social isolation. This feature of robotic care usually raises strong ethical concerns about potentially decreased comfort for the care-dependent. In a large-scale online study, we tested the influence of the pandemic on people's affective attitudes toward care robots. In vignettes on different care scenarios, we measured participants' perceived comfort levels in situations with care robots and human caregivers while controlling for their fear of infection with a viral disease. We found that people generally feel less comfortable with a care robot than with a human caregiver. However, those who had a strong fear of being infected during the pandemic did not devalue a care robot compared to a human caregiver. While care robots remain ethically contested, this study shows that affective attitudes toward care robots may change significantly if they can address an urgent need. Keywords: Care robots; Affective attitudes; COVID-19 pandemic; Vignette experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:teinso:v:76:y:2024:i:c:s0160791x24000125 DOI: 10.1016/j.techsoc.2024.102464 Access Statistics for this article Technology in Society is currently edited by Charla Griffy-Brown More articles in Technology in Society from Elsevier |
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