A Common Social Distance Scale for Robots and Humans*

Abstract

From keeping robots as in-home helpers to banning their presence or functions, a person’s willingness to engage in variably intimate interactions are signals of social distance: the degree of felt understanding of and intimacy with an individual or group that characterizes pre-social and social connections. To date, social distance has been examined through surrogate metrics not actually representing the construct (e.g., self-disclosure or physical proximity). To address this gap between operations and measurement, this project details a four-stage social distance scale development project, inclusive of systematic item pool-generation, candidate item ratings for laypersons thinking about social distance, testing of candidate items via scalogram and initial validity analyses, and final testing for cumulative structure and predictive validity. The final metric yields a 15-item (18, counting applications with a ‘none’ option), three-dimension scale for physical distance, relational distance, and conversational distance.