Religiosity and Attitudes towards Robots: Results from a Global Survey

Religion is one lens through which people understand and interpret the world around them. In this article, the authors investigate how an individual's religiosity impacts perceptions of robots, using data from a large-scale global survey of attitudes toward robots (N=1263). To investigate how religion impacts such perceptions, cluster, factor, and regression analyses were used. The findings illustrate that there are three discernible clusters of individuals exhibiting different levels of religiosity and different perceptions of robots, showing that less religious individuals are more likely to be robophilic. At the same time, no differences were found between respondents with medium and high levels of religiosity. While there is a clear indication that there is a negative relationship between religiosity and attitudes toward robots, religiosity does not have a particularly strong impact on perceptions toward robots. The analysis illustrates that there are other factors more clearly associated with perceptions of robots such as people's perceptions of the positive and negative societal impacts of robots. In addition, there seems to be no notable relation ship between perceptions of robots and the demographics of individuals, illustrat- ing that the gender, wealth, and education of an individual may not play a strong role in shaping perceptions toward robots.