A common social distance scale for robots and humans

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