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Ruijten, P. A. M., Bouten, D. H. L.,

Rouschop, D. C. J., Ham, J., & Midden,
C. J. H. (2014). Introducing a Rasch...
Peter Ruijten

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 Introducing a Rasch-Type Anthropomorphism Scale
Peter A. M. Ruijten*, Diane H. L. Bouten, Dana C. J. Rouschop, Jaap Ham, Cees J. H. Midden
Eindhoven University of Technology
School of Innovation Sciences
Eindhoven, Netherlands, P.O. 513
p.a.m.ruijten[at]tue.nl
ABSTRACT
In human-robot interaction research, much attention is given to
the extent to which people perceive humanlike attributes in robots.
Generally, the concept anthropomorphism is used to describe this
process. Anthropomorphism is defined in different ways, with
much focus on either typical human attributes or uniquely human
attributes. This difference has caused different measurement tools
to be developed. We argue that anthropomorphism can best be
described as a continuum ranging from low to high human
likeness, and should be measured accordingly. We found that
anthropomorphic characteristics can be invariantly ordered
according to the ease with which these can be ascribed to robots.
General Terms
Design, Human Factors, Measurement, Standardization.
Keywords
Anthropomorphism, Rasch.
1. INTRODUCTION
As technology plays an increasingly prominent role in our lives,
our perception of those technologies becomes more important. To
describe how people perceive robots, the concept of
anthropomorphism is often used. Generally, this involves the
tendency to attribute human characteristics to robots. However,
not all researchers use the exact same definition. For example, [1]
refer to anthropomorphism as “the attribution of a human form,
human characteristics, or human behavior to nonhuman things”
(p.74), while [2] define anthropomorphism as “a process of
inductive inference whereby people imbue the real or imagined
behavior of other agents with humanlike characteristics,
motivations, intentions, or underlying mental states” (p.411). A
closer look of these definitions shows us that differences arise due
to referring to different types of human characteristics. Human
characteristics are generally divided in typical and unique.
Typically human characteristics are generally associated with
humans, but humans are not the only entities that have those traits
[3]. An example is being able to interact with a changing
environment. Uniquely human characteristics refer to traits that
are unique for the human species [3], like having a moral
conscience. We note that [1] mainly refer to typically human
characteristics, while [2] mainly refer to uniquely human
characteristics. Furthermore, [4] take on yet another approach.
While they adopt [3]’s concepts of typically and uniquely human,
they only refer to cognitive traits, leaving appearance and physical
abilities that characterize humans aside. Because of these
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HRI'14, Mar 03-06 2014, Bielefeld, Germany
ACM 978-1-4503-2658-2/14/03.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2559636.2559825
differences in focus, a robot that is considered to be
anthropomorphic according to one definition might be seen as
non-anthropomorphic according to another one, and vice versa. In
other words, since in most of the current research only one of
these different aspects of anthropomorphism is being measured,
the results are non-generalizable and non-comparable.
We argue that the attribution of typically and uniquely human
characteristics to robots reflect a single human predisposition, as
is indicated in Figure 1. In other words, we expect that
anthropomorphic characteristics may be ordered according to the
ease to which they are ascribed to robots in a manner that is the
same for all individuals in their encounter with all robots. In
particular, we expect that typically human characteristics are more
easily ascribed to robots than uniquely ones, regardless of the
individuals’ predisposition to attribute anthropomorphic
characteristics to robots. Inversely, the expected ordering of
anthropomorphic characteristics would prescribe that people who
attribute uniquely human characteristics to a robot must also
ascribe typical characteristics to it.
Figure 1: Conceptual representation of human characteristics
on an anthropomorphism continuum
One model that mathematically describes these expectations is the
Rasch model, which assumes that the trait to be measured is a
one-dimensional latent variable [5, 6, 7]. In the model, two
parameters are estimated; one to distinguish between individuals,
and another one to order the latent variable’s characteristics [6].
Both of them are interesting, because they can tell us something
about the underlying process of anthropomorphism. We aim to
develop a measurement scale for anthropomorphism based on the
Rasch model.
2. METHOD & RESULTS
As a first step, we designed 37 yes/no items about
anthropomorphic qualities a robot can have. We subjected these
items to a content validity test, in which we tested all items on
unique humanness (n=17, Mage=21.1, SDage=1.79), typical
humanness (n=20, Mage=19.9, SDage=1.98), sociality (n=18,
Mage=19.9, SDage=1.79) and valence (n=20, Mage=20, SDage=2.50),
where valence should not be correlated with anthropomorphism.
*Corresponding author
Hereafter, we tested the full measurement scale in an online
sample with 124 participants (Mage=26.1 and SDage=8.82) and
analyzed the probability of each item to be answered with ‘yes’.
The items that were most likely to be answered with ‘yes’ have a
low so called ‘item difficulty’ and indicate low anthropomorphism
whereas the items that were least likely to be answered with ‘yes’
have a high ‘item difficulty’ and are high anthropomorphic. These
item difficulties thus tell us something about the underlying
process of attributing humanlike characteristics to robots.
We used the Rasch model fit statistics (for an overview, see [6])
to determine which of the 37 items were fitting the model. During
this process, we removed 12 items (about half of those because of
misfit, half because they did not correlate well with the content
validity results) to end up with a revised 25-item scale. Infit mean
squares for the 25 items ranged from .77 to 1.21; outfit mean
squares ranged from .50 to 1.85.
Next, we correlated item difficulties of both the 37-item scale and
the 25-item scale with the results of the content validity questions.
A high correlation means that the items have similar scores on
anthropomorphism and the content validity measure. All
correlations confirmed our expectations and are shown in Table 1.
Table 1: Correlations between item difficulties and content
validity measures
37-item 25-item
Uniquely human r = .434, p = .007 r = .551, p = .004
Typically human r = .603, p < .001 r = .652, p < .001
Sociality r = .556, p < .001 r = .609, p = .001
Valence r = -.098, p = .563 r = -.194, p = .352
2.1 Measurement verification
After having validated out measurement scale, it still had to be
verified. That is, we needed to know to what extent our
measurement scale related to already existing anthropomorphism
measurements.
In an online study, 131 participants (Mage=34.86, SDage=17.592)
were divided over two conditions. In each condition, participants
watched a video of a robot that either only had typically human
characteristics or that also had uniquely human characteristics.
Next, participants completed multiple anthropomorphism
questionnaires: our 25-item scale (α = .77), a 6-item questionnaire
proposed by [2], referred to as the Waytz scale (α = .78), and the
5-item anthropomorphism part of the Godspeed questionnaire [1],
referred to as the Bartneck scale (α = .71).
When checking for differences between the videos, no significant
effects were found on any of the anthropomorphism
measurements (all p’s > 0.15). Nevertheless, significant
correlations were found between our scale (M = 9.84, SD = 2.79)
and both the Waytz scale (M = 1.23, SD = 0.40, r = .453, p < .001)
and the Bartneck scale (M = 2.52, SD = 0.82, r = .232, p = .008).
This suggests that our scale measures the same concept as the
other scales. It appears that our scale measures personal
dispositions to attribute humanlike characteristics to robots and
conjointly the ease with which various anthropomorphic
characteristics are attributed to robots. Furthermore, since both
our studies applied the same scale, it is possible to make a
comparison between them. The item difficulties strongly correlate
between the two studies (r = .962, p < .001), which suggests that
the ordering of items on the anthropomorphism continuum is
independent of the study.
3. DISCUSSION
In this paper we argued that anthropomorphism does not simply
consist of one single attribution, but covers a continuum of
attributions ranging from typically to uniquely human
characteristics. Most of the previous research conducted on
anthropomorphic robots only investigated parts of the continuum,
which limits the interpretation of the underlying process.
We argue that when a robot is perceived to have some uniquely
human characteristics, this indicates that this robot must contain
both typically and uniquely human characteristics. An additional
advantage of measuring the two aspects simultaneously is that it
shows that all characteristics belong to one continuum, and that
these characteristics are hierarchically ordered in a way that is the
same for all individuals. This ordering tells us something about
the underlying process of anthropomorphism.
In sum, we have developed a measurement scale that consistently
measures anthropomorphism as a continuum over different
studies. Furthermore, the ordering of the items seems to be stable
over different samples. We have shown that the Rasch model can
be used to mathematically describe this invariant ordering of
anthropomorphic inferences. Follow-up research will be designed
to further develop the scale and to investigate its robustness.
4. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank Antal Haans and Maartje van ‘t Sant for
their helpful contributions to this project.
5. REFERENCES
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[3] Haslam, N., Bain, P., Loughnan, S., & Kashima, Y. (2008).
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