IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2019 - 50

TABLE 4. Odds ratios and their confidence intervals in brackets. All ORs shown are statistically significant with
a p value 1 0.05.
Personal
Personal
New Technology
Robots
Interest in
Experience
Can Take Away
as a
Technology Using Robots Jobs from Humans Threat
Q9 (Positive
3.8
view of robots) (2.6-5.4)
Q1 (neutral
& disagree)

0.2 (0.1-0.3)

Robots Robots
Robots Robots
as
as Plane as Taxi as House
Surgeon Pilots
Drivers Cleaners

0.1
2.2
(0.09-0.2) (1.6-3)

3.3
3.4
4.3
3.2
(2.5-4.5) (2.5-4.5) (3.2-5.1) (2.1-5.1)

0.58
(0.39-0.87)

Q1 (neutral
& agree)
Q2 (neutral
& disagree)

2.0
(1.5-2.7)

Robots
as
Friends

0.56 (0.38-0.84)
0.59
(0.4-0.88)

Q3 (neutral
& agree)

1.67
1.53
(1.22-2.3) (1.12-2.1)

Q4 (neutral
& disagree)

0.6
(0.4-0.88)

Q5 (neutral
& agree)

1.66
(1.07-2.5)

0.7
(0.5-0.99)

1.77
(1.02-3)

Q6 (neutral
& disagree)
Q6 (neutral
& agree)

0.6
(0.4-0.93)
0.59 (0.4-0.84)

For question 3, neutral and confident in humans
answers crossed with friend and surgeon as robot produced
significant ORs of 1.67 and 1.53, respectively (p < 0.05).
For question 4, neutral and not confident in humans
answers crossed with military capacity for robots produced an OR of 0.74.
For question 5, neutral and confident in humans
crossed with personal interest in technology, positive
view of robots and house cleaning, produced ORs of
1.66, 1.8, 1.77, respectively (p < 0.05). When neutral and
confident in humans was crossed with concerns about
robots being a threat, the OR was 0.7.
For question 6, neutral and not confident in humans
answers crossed with robots as taxi-drivers gave a significant OR of 0.6 (p  < 0.05). Whereas for the same
question, neutral and confident in humans answers
crossed with concerns that new technology can take
away jobs from humans, friend, and robot-cook, gave
ORs of 0.59, 0.7, and 1.43, respectively (p < 0.05).
Concerning robot configurations, six attributes of
dependability were investigated in Section C: availability
(q.  40), reliability (q.  41), safety (q.  42), confidentiality
(q. 43), integrity (q. 44), and maintainability (q. 45). The
majority of the respondents perceived as important the
attributes associated with questions 40, 42, 43, 44,
and  45 (29.8% for q.  40 and higher than 60% for the
others). For the majority of the sample (31.12%) the

50

0.7
(0.5-0.98)

robot's reliability was very important (q. 41). The results
are showed in Table 5.

Discussion
This section discusses the results from the pilot survey
we carried out on a large sample of Italian students to
address attitudes of trust toward robots in relation to
confidence in interpersonal relationships among
humans, and to identify what features the "robot you
desire" should have. At the same time, bottom-up recommendations were proposed for robotic companies
regarding possible investment directions.
Although the data shows there is a tendency to trust
machines more than humans, interesting differences
within this framework were found that need to be considered for their relevance for future research.
Despite a large part of the sample being somewhat
wary of others - they disagreed that most people are
honest, good, kind, and trustworthy - these same
respondents had a propensity to be trustful (55.9%). In
other words, the subjective dimension of confidence or
dispositional trust [28] was positive, whereas the objective
dimension of trust perception showed an inverse trend.
These results suggest there was a strong willingness to
increase trust in others for most respondents, although it
clashed with the daily reality of interpersonal relationships, which was mostly framed as general distrust.

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DECEMBER 2019
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2019

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