Kate Mays

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Assistant Professor at University of Vermont

People’s comfort with and acceptability of artificial intelligence (AI) instantiations is a topic that has received little systematic study. This is surprising given the topic’s relevance to the design, deployment and even regulation of AI systems. To help fill in our knowledge base, we conducted mixed-methods analysis based on a survey of a repres...

This study examines facets of robot humanization, defined as how people think of robots as social and human-like entities through perceptions of liking, human-likeness, and rights entitlement. The current study investigates how different trait differences in robots (gender, physical humanness, and relational status) and participants (trait differen...

Technology is often an augur of both possibility and peril in our lives. It promises to make our lives easier, more enjoyable, more efficient, but it also threatens the status quo. The mobile phone is a recent example: people were better able to coordinate their lives and keep in touch with loved ones, but it also changed the nature of public space...

This study examines public perceptions of AI fairness across three societal contexts in the U.S.: personal life, work life, and public life. AI fairness is conceptualized through perceived harms and benefits, offering a nuanced perspective on how individuals assess AI's impact on themselves versus others. Findings show that AI is generally perceive...

Focusing on a polarized issue—U.S. gun violence—this study examines agenda setting as an antecedent of political expression on social media. A state-of-the-art machine-learning model was used to analyze news coverage from 25 media outlets—mainstream and partisan. Those results were paired with a two-wave panel survey conducted during the 2018 U.S....

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Modern AI applications have caused broad societal implications across key public domains. While previous research primarily focuses on individual user perspectives regarding AI systems, this study expands our understanding to encompass general public perceptions. Through a survey (N = 1506), we examined public trust across various tasks within educ...

To better understand what drives the public’s perception and acceptance of AI in different roles, we propose a study that looks at varying AI domains by occupational status and individual differences across ontological perceptions, automation anxiety, perceived status, and identity threat. As a first step, we conducted a representative survey of th...

The present study explores people’s attitudes towards an assortment of occupations on high and low-likelihood of automation probability. An omnibus survey (N = 1150) was conducted to measure attitudes about various emerging technologies, as well as demographic and individual traits. The results showed that respondents were not very comfortable with...

Considering possible impediments to authentic interactions with machines, this study explores contributors to robophobia from the potential dual influence of technological features and individual traits. Through a 2 x 2 x 3 online experiment, a robot’s physical human-likeness, gender, and status were manipulated and individual differences in robot...

To better understand what drives the public’s perception and acceptance of AI in different roles, we propose a study that looks at varying AI domains by occupational status and individual differences across ontological perceptions, automation anxiety, perceived status, and identity threat. As a first step, we conducted a representative survey of th...

Introduction: COVID-19 has had a devastating impact on people's lives since its initial outbreak and global spread in 2020. While the U.S. government and public health officials have recommended best practices such as social distancing, wearing a mask, and avoiding large public gatherings, these orders have been met with varying levels of acceptan...

As biometric technology relies on bodily, physical information, it is among the more intrusive technologies in the contemporary consumer market. Consumer products containing biometric technology are becoming more popular and normalized, yet little is known about public perceptions concerning its privacy implications, especially from the perspective...

People around the world who seek to interact with large organisations increasingly find they must do so via mediated and automated communication. Organisations often deploy both mediated and automated platforms, such as instant messaging and interactive voice response systems (IVRs), for efficiency and cost-savings. Customer and client responses to...

This qualitative study aimed to investigate the norms and daily practices around mobile and social technology by examining what happens when mobile phones and social media on any devices are removed from one’s daily life. Most studies on technology non-use focus on one device or plat-form. In this study, participants (N = 78) relinquished not only...

Education technology (Edtech) is a booming industry based on its potential to transform education and learning outcomes. With concern over remote learning, there is renewed excitement about the visual component of Edtech, namely VR, along with artificial intelligence (AI), resulting in more significant investments and innovations. Despite industria...

Despite several transient spikes in response to the deadliest mass shootings, the U.S. population continues to perceive gun violence as less important than other issues, and public opinion remains divided along partisan lines. Drawing upon literature of compelling arguments and partisan media, this study investigates what kind of news framing—episo...

Online dating apps have become an increasingly common way to meet prospective partners and form relationships. Though previous research lends insight into who uses these platforms and why, relatively little is known about the nature of in-app behavior during that usage. The current study directly monitors sessions of dating app usage, observing how...

In the last few years, smart security and physical identification technologies have grown exponentially; people are increasingly installing smart video devices to monitor their homes and buying DNA kits to collect and analyze their genetics. As the number of users and profits of these businesses increase, so too does the potential for privacy viola...

Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics applications have proliferated primarily in the industrial sphere, and social scientific studies emphasized robots’ functionality and appropriateness for certain roles, especially those related to work and most particularly to robots replacing humans’ jobs. Notably, robot studies are often premised on negat...

This chapter analyzes structural changes arising from both economy‐wide and life course- long applications of mobile communication technology. These changes trickle through all sectors of society, including the domestic sphere, which arguably has been most pro­foundly affected by it. The chapter highlights some ways in which people have used the mo...

We report results of a comparison of the accuracy of crowdworkers and seven NaturalLanguage Processing (NLP) toolkits in solving two important NLP tasks, named-entity recognition (NER) and entity-level sentiment(ELS) analysis. We here focus on a challenging dataset, 1,000 political tweets that were collected during the U.S. presidential primary ele...

Crowdcoding, a method that outsources “coding” tasks to numerous people on the internet, has emerged as a popular approach for annotating texts and visuals. However, the performance of this approach for analyzing social media data in the context of journalism and mass communication research has not been systematically assessed. This study evaluated...

The book concludes with a summary of the various perspectives presented throughout the chapters and the trends emerging from the practitioner lessons that each chapter provides for journalists in the age of social media. The chapter considers what is old and what is new with social media and journalism through the three lenses that have guided the...

Due to concerns about human error in crowdsourcing, it is standard practice to collect labels for the same data point from multiple internet workers. We here show that the resulting budget can be used more effectively with a flexible worker assignment strategy that asks fewer workers to analyze easy-to-label data and more workers to analyze data th...

The South China Sea dispute is one of the most complicated geopolitical issues of the twenty-first century. While this international conflict revolves around military and economic disputes, in today’s information age international politics also hinges on how each country presents the dispute in the news and whose “story” wins. Based on the Network...

In the last decade, the Internet has become more widely diffused and mobile, developing into a more interactive, globalized space with greater potential for democratic participation and mobilization. An earlier study by Groshek (2010) found that from 1994 to 2003, the Internet had limited national-level democratic effects, which suggested that Inte...

Opinions about the 2016 U.S. Presidential Candidates have been expressed in millions of tweets that are challenging to analyze automatically. Crowdsourcing the analysis of political tweets effectively is also difficult, due to large inter-rater disagreements when sarcasm is involved. Each tweet is typically analyzed by a fixed number of workers and...

Opinions about the 2016 U.S. Presidential Candidates have been expressed in millions of tweets that are challenging to analyze automatically. Crowdsourcing the analysis of political tweets effectively is also difficult, due to large inter-rater disagreements when sarcasm is involved. Each tweet is typically analyzed by a fixed number of workers and...