Society's Attitudes Towards Human Augmentation and Performance Enhancement Technologies (SHAPE) Scale

Abstract

Human augmentation technologies (ATs) are a subset of ubiquitous on-body devices designed to improve cognitive, sensory, and motor capacities. Although there is a large corpus of knowledge concerning ATs, less is known about societal attitudes towards them and how they shift over time. To that end, we developed The Society's Attitudes Towards Human Augmentation and Performance Enhancement Technologies (SHAPE) Scale, which measures how users of ATs are perceived. To develop the scale, we first created a list of possible scale items based on past work on how people respond to new technologies. The items were then reviewed by experts. Next, we performed exploratory factor analysis to reduce the scale to its final length of thirteen items. Subsequently, we confirmed test-retest validity of our instrument, as well as its construct validity. The SHAPE scale enables researchers and practitioners to understand elements contributing to attitudes toward augmentation technology users. The SHAPE scale assists designers of ATs in designing artifacts that will be more universally accepted.