Full title: Creepy Technology: What Is It and How Do You Measure It?
Published at: CHI 2021
DOI: 10.1145/3411764.3445299
Authors: Paweł W. Woźniak, Jakob Karolus, Florian Lang, Caroline Eckerth, Johannes Schöning, Yvonne Rogers, Jasmin Niess
The PCTS is an eight-item scale that measures how creepy a technology appears to a user during an initial encounter. It was developed from a conceptual model of creepiness grounded in a literature review and ten focus groups with users from diverse backgrounds. The scale helps designers and researchers compare interactive technologies and avoid designs that produce feelings of creepiness in users.
Implied Malice (IM) — the perception that the designer of the technology had bad or unethical intentions. Generalises the understanding of creepy as a privacy violation.
Undesirability (UD) — the feeling that the technology is out of place or socially unacceptable; unease due to context mismatch or aesthetic incongruity.
Unpredictability (UP) — negative feelings arising from not being able to anticipate the system’s behaviour or purpose.
Participants respond on a 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree, 7 = Strongly Agree). Items marked (R) are reverse-scored.
| # | Item | Subscale |
|---|---|---|
| Q1 | I think that the designer of this system had immoral intentions. | Implied Malice |
| Q2 | The design of this system is unethical. | Implied Malice |
| Q3 | Using this system in public areas will make other people laugh at me. | Undesirability |
| Q4 | I would feel uneasy wearing this system in public. | Undesirability |
| Q5 | The system looks bizarre to me. | Undesirability |
| Q6 | This system looks as expected. (R) | Unpredictability |
| Q7 | I don’t know what the purpose of the system is. | Unpredictability |
| Q8 | This system has a clear purpose. (R) | Unpredictability |
Because the subscales have unequal item counts (2 + 3 + 3), equal weight is given to each subscale by multiplying the Implied Malice sum by 1.5:
PCTS = PCTS-IM + PCTS-UD + PCTS-UP
where PCTS-IM = (Q1 + Q2) × 1.5
PCTS-UD = Q3 + Q4 + Q5
PCTS-UP = Q6R + Q7 + Q8R