The General Attitudes Towards Robots Scale (GAToRS): A Preliminary Validation of the Italian Version

Social robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are two technologies currently benefitting from significant scientific advancements. By consequence, the development of social robots equipped with AI is also progressing fast, and their presence and relevance in our lives are set to increase considerably. Thus, in view of a context characterized by the spread of the humanoid robots, the development of scales which measure peoples’ attitudes towards social robots is of great importance and value. The aim of this paper was to translate and validate in the Italian language the English version of the General Attitudes Towards Robots Scale (GAToRS). GAToRS measures individual and social dimensions, considering both positive and negative attitudes towards robots. We compiled a questionnaire incorporating the GAToRS and sociodemographic items and administered it to a non-probabilistic sample composed of 302 Italian citizens working in the health care sector. To identify the latent underlying dimensions, we applied exploratory factor analysis to the set of the twenty GAToRS items. We used confirmatory factor analysis to investigate the factorial structure validity of the scale and Cronbach’s alpha to measure the internal consistency. The results obtained for the Italian context suggest a version of the GAToRS which excludes the item related to the need to monitor robot technology.