Testing Implicit Attitudes Toward Prospective Military Reconnaissance Robots

Soldiers must rapidly decide whether battlefield robots are allies or liabilities, yet most acceptance research relies solely on self-report. We adapted the Robot Implicit Association Test (R-IAT) to capture unconscious evaluations of two remotely piloted Army reconnaissance robots—a tracked Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) and a dog-like quadruped (“Spot”). One hundred thirteen undergraduates completed a seven-block R-IAT, pairing the robot images with positive or negative valence words. Response latencies revealed participants held an implicit preference for Spot over the UGV. Explicit measures did not correlate with R-IAT scores, underscoring the importance of implicit tests for revealing attitudes self-reports miss. Measuring, and designing for, these biases is essential to fielding robots that earn calibrated reliance.