A Stranger in the Classroom: Pre-service Teachers’ Anxiety and Negative Attitudes Toward Humanoid Social Robots

• Published in: Culture and Computing. Design Thinking and Cultural Computing pp. 461 - 473
• Main Authors: Rosanda, Violeta, Istenič, Andreja
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Anxiety; Negative attitudes toward social robots; Pre-service teachers
• ISBN: 9783030774301; 3030774309
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-77431-8_29

While exploring a pre-service teacher population, which is not willing to accept social robots in their future classroom, we find a low level of robot anxiety, slightly negative general attitudes toward social robots in education and a strong positive correlation between anxiety and negative attitudes in general. Our findings put in evidence also a strong positive correlation between anxiety and negative attitudes toward interactions with robot, which we interprete with Anxiety/uncertainty management theory. In human relations the communication with a stranger of another culture results in the managment of uncertainty and in some associated anxiety and can lead to communication avoidance with strangers. The participants of our research were exposed to videos showing NAO robot performing a pedagogical role in the classroom environment and did not have direct interactions with the robot.