What are European Union Public Attitudes towards Robots? (Invited Paper)

This paper presents a very brief overview of public attitudes towards robots from different geographical regions of the world but focuses on one such study in one particular geographic area, the European Union (EU) of 27 countries. By far, the Eurobarameter Survey on Public Attitudes towards Robots, released online in 2012, is the largest study of public attitudes towards robots. It focused exclusively on descriptive statistics which are mathematical procedures used to organize, summarize and simplify data. The statistical procedures used in this paper to perform a secondary data analysis of the data from the Eurobarameter Survey on Attitudes towards robots focused on inferential statistics which focus on inference and statistical comparisons. Secondary data analyses are often used when large data sets are posted online for public, professional, and educational use. A one-way repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA), and separate two-way independent-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to analyze participant responses on relevant survey questions. The results supported our hypotheses that there are significant differences in EU public attitudes by gender and age group