I was part of team that surveyed residents of Christiansburg, Virginia—the site of the most advanced residential drone delivery trial in the United States, launched by the Alphabet subsidiary @Wing in October 2019.

Here's a thread on why we found. https://issues.org/when-the-drone-is-in-your-backyard-nelsen-guthrie-vinsel/

I was brought on as a social science consultant after the research team in @MAAPUAS decided they wanted to survey Christiansburg where people had actually experienced drone delivery. They were also interested in how COVID experiences may have shaped sentiment.

Wing paid for mailing the survey twice to Christiansburg residents and Facebook advertising, but was not involved in survey design or analysis of results.

We ended up with 821 responses that fit our criteria.

Previous surveys around drone delivery had a few problems: First, they all involved respondents who hadn't experienced the technology but were asked to speculate about it (more on this below).

Second, in several of them, researchers asked about specific risks (safety, privacy, noise, etc.), which may have had priming effects and framed the technology as problematic.

So, our survey was - to date - unique in that we surveyed people actually exposed to drone delivery. And we just asked qualitative questions about the upsides and downsides of the technology, rather than discussing specific pre-identified risks.

The top-level finding was that Christiansburg respondents were hugely positive about droner delivery, especially when compared to surveys involving speculation.

87% reported positive sentiment about drone delivery, and 89% either had used it or said they would like to.

In previous surveys, positive sentiment never exceeded 51%.

The difference is probably at least partly explained by familiarity. Familiarity leading to technology acceptance is an idea that goes back to at least the 1950s in technology studies, maybe even the 1920s.

Surprising to me, in our results, positive sentiment was not strongly associated with any demographic factors. It basically carried across demographic categories.

More interesting to me, the downsides people reported in our study were radically different than previous ones.

One 2019 study, for example, found that 71% of people reported being worried about privacy, and 68% were worried about safety.

In our study, people mentioned safety or privacy less than 10% of the time each.

The biggest downside people mentioned in our survey was noise, at 17% of respondents.

But 75% of the people who mentioned noise still had positive sentiment about drone delivery, and 61% said they'd be likely to use it.

We can only speculate, but my guess is that this difference between speculative worry about privacy and safety versus a small focus on noise in people who've actually experienced the tech is also about familiarity.

When we experience something, our senses of the downsides of it changes and in a sense becomes more accurate (in not being only rooted in our imagination).

Also, 58% of people said that COVID times made them more positive about drone delivery. We also saw this in qualitative response - for instance, where people mentioned the technology being "no touch" or not needing to leave the house during a pandemic.

Overall I think this study points to the need for more of its kind, including with future drone delivery trials.

Both the drone delivery industry and the FAA should be happy with how positive sentiment is in people who have been around this application.

To my mind, our findings also raise serious questions about what we get out of studies where we are asking people to speculate about technologies they haven't experienced.

I will say more about what this means for my fields, including for so-called "anticipatory governance," in a later thread.

For now, I'll just say if you are asking people to speculate, you'd better have a pretty good reason for doing so. Speculation isn't experience.