The impact of priming on the adoption of robots for personal use

In the 21st century, direct interaction with robots in our daily lives seems inevitable, so the extent to which people accept these devices, especially for personal use, is a not uninteresting question from a research perspective. The widespread adoption of robots in service sectors (e.g. nursing, elderly care, catering), in addition to industrial use, justifies an investigation of the degree of user acceptance of these devices and of the personality traits that may be associated with higher acceptance of robot use. The research sought to answer two questions: (1) whether priming (viewing short, intense videos) influences the level of acceptance of robots in the subjects, and (2) how personality traits such as diverse curiosity, uncertainty intolerance or state anxiety are related to the acceptance of robots. 129 women and men aged 18-27 years participated in the survey in March 2023. In the experimental design, participants completed the Epistemic Curiosity Questionnaire, the IUS-12 (Uncertainty Intolerance Scale) test, the STAIS-5 state anxiety test, and a self-developed test of robot acceptance after playing short videos (one positive, friendly and one negative, threatening) used as a preloading tool. As a result of the experiment, it was found that it was not the prefix of the message (friendly/positive or threatening/negative) that influenced the subjects, but the presentation of the robots in general and the subjective emotion (discomfort, threat, arousal) evoked by what they saw. There is a strong positive correlation with robot acceptability on the epistemic curiosity questionnaire's universal curiosity scale, and an interesting finding that warrants further investigation is that those scoring high on the uncertainty-intolerance scale show a positive correlation with robot acceptability. The experiment supported the hypothesis that men are more supportive than women of the use of robots in everyday life and personal use.