Emerging Adults' Expectations about the Next Generation of Robots: Exploring Robotic Needs through a Latent Profile Analysis

The investigation of emerging adults' expectations of development of the next generation of robots is a fundamental challenge to narrow the gap between expectations and real technological advances, which can potentially impact the effectiveness of future interactions between humans and robots. Furthermore, the literature highlights the important role played by negative attitudes toward robots in setting people's expectations. To better explore these expectations, we administered the Scale for Robotic Needs and performed a latent profile analysis to describe different expectation profiles about the development of future robots. The profiles identified through this methodology can be placed along a continuum of robots' humanization: from a group that desires mainly the technical features to a group that imagines a humanized robot in the future. Finally, the analysis of emerging adults' knowledge about robots and their negative attitudes toward robots allowed us to understand how these affect their expectations.