Attitudes towards social robots in education: Enthusiast, practical, troubled, sceptic, and mindfully positive

While social robots bring new opportunities for education, they also come with moralchallenges. Therefore, there is a need for moral guidelines for the responsible implementation ofthese robots. When developing such guidelines, it is important to include different stakeholderperspectives. Existing (qualitative) studies regarding these perspectives however mainly focus onsingle stakeholders. In this exploratory study, we examine and compare the attitudes of multiplestakeholders on the use of social robots in primary education, using a novel questionnaire thatcovers various aspects of moral issues mentioned in earlier studies. Furthermore, we also group thestakeholders based on similarities in attitudes and examine which socio-demographic characteristicsinfluence these attitude types. Based on the results, we identify five distinct attitude profiles andshow that the probability of belonging to a specific profile is affected by such characteristics asstakeholder type, age, education and income. Our results also indicate that social robots have thepotential to be implemented in education in a morally responsible way that takes into account theattitudes of various stakeholders, although there are multiple moral issues that need to be addressedfirst. Finally, we present seven (practical) implications for a responsible application of social robots ineducation following from our results. These implications provide valuable insights into how socialrobots should be implemented.