Applying the Perceived Creepiness of Technology Scale to Social Robots

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.