Evaluating People’s Perceptions of Trust in a Robot in a Repeated Interactions Study

Abstract

Trust has been established to be a key factor in fostering human-robot interactions. However, trust can change overtime according to different factors, including a breach of trust due to a robot's error. In this exploratory study, we observed people's interactions with a companion robot in a real house, adapted for human-robot interaction experimentation, over three weeks. The interactions happened in six scenarios in which a robot performed different tasks under two different conditions. Each condition included fourteen tasks performed by the robot, either correctly, or with errors with severe consequences on the first or last day of interaction. At the end of each experimental condition, participants were presented with an emergency scenario to evaluate their trust in the robot. We evaluated participants' trust in the robot by observing their decision to trust the robot during the emergency scenario, and by collecting their views through questionnaires. We concluded that there is a correlation between the timing of an error with severe consequences performed by the robot and the corresponding loss of trust of the human in the robot. In particular, people's trust is subjected to the initial mental formation.

The Doors of Social Robot Perception: The Influence of Implicit Self-theories

“…Comparatively, incremental theorists who focus on learning goals (Molden and Dweck, 2006), and value effort processes over flawless performance (Dweck, 2008) will be less likely to lose trust in a robot that errs. Future studies could test these predictions by having individuals interact with a social robot that makes errors (e.g., Rossi et al, 2020) and by assessing implicit self-theory and trust evaluations (e.g., Haselhuhn et al, 2017).…”

Can You Activate Me? From Robots to Human Brain

“…violence or pain) are facilitated in a first "encounter" with the robot, also given our natural tendency to anthropomorphize many different entities. Prior experience with the robot's actual physical and psychological limits, on the other hand, provides us with a contextual frame of reference whereby topdown processes would modulate or inhibit the response of automatic mechanisms (Paetzel et al, 2020;Rossi et al, 2020). Concluding, although further studies are necessary, we can state that the level of physical anthropomorphism, the type and kinematics of the actions performed by robots jointly activate the social brain areas, consequently increasing the perception of robots as social partners.…”

Evaluating the Effect of Theory of Mind on People’s Trust in a Faulty Robot

“…In summary, this study highlights the importance of ToM on people's perception of the robot by providing a powerful factor to manipulate their expectations and trust in the robot. Further investigations will focus on how to discriminate the observed factors (i.e., novelty and fun effects) by conducting long-term studies and varying the perception of risk associated with the task (e.g., the participant may lose money when they lose the game) ( [17], [27]).…”

“…In this work, we used a variation of the Price Game developed by Rau et al [16], and designed a Sci-fi Book Game scenario that consisted of three phases, in which the interaction between the robot and a participant was supported by an actor. The first phase of the interaction was designed considering previous findings which highlighted that people's impression of a robot is formed during their first encounters ( [17], [18]). Here, the robot was the player that was requested to guess the date with the suggestions provided by the human assistants (actor and participant).…”