RoSIP: A Scale for Measuring Appearance-Based Social Interaction Potential in Robots

First impressions are critical for public-facing social robots: users rapidly infer a robot’s potential for social interaction from its appearance, shaping expectations and willingness to engage. Yet no existing scale captures how people interpret the interaction potential implied by a robot’s visual affordances. We introduce the Robot Social Interaction Potential Scale (RoSIP), a concise appearance-based scale assessing two dimensions—Perceptual Potential and Behavioral Potential. Across a pilot study and large-scale exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses (N = 750), we identified a 10-item, two-factor structure with strong internal consistency and solid construct and discriminant validity. RoSIP provides a dedicated tool for rapidly quantifying appearance-based inferences about a robot’s social interaction potential, enabling future work to systematically link robot morphology and social perception in HRI.