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Do Robot Performance and Behavioral Style affect Human Trust?

A Multi-Method Approach

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International Journal of Social Robotics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

An important aspect of a robot’s social behavior is to convey the right amount of trustworthiness. Task performance has shown to be an important source for trustworthiness judgments. Here, we argue that factors such as a robot’s behavioral style can play an important role as well. Our approach to studying the effects of a robot’s performance and behavioral style on human trust involves experiments with simulated robots in video human–robot interaction (VHRI) and immersive virtual environments (IVE). Although VHRI and IVE settings cannot substitute for the genuine interaction with a real robot, they can provide useful complementary approaches to experimental research in social human robot interaction. VHRI enables rapid prototyping of robot behaviors. Simulating human–robot interaction in IVEs can be a useful tool for measuring human responses to robots and help avoid the many constraints caused by real-world hardware. However, there are also difficulties with the generalization of results from one setting (e.g., VHRI) to another (e.g. IVE or the real world), which we discuss. In this paper, we use animated robot avatars in VHRI to rapidly identify robot behavioral styles that affect human trust assessment of the robot. In a subsequent study, we use an IVE to measure behavioral interaction between humans and an animated robot avatar equipped with behaviors from the VHRI experiment. Our findings reconfirm that a robot’s task performance influences its trustworthiness, but the effect of the behavioral style identified in the VHRI study did not influence the robot’s trustworthiness in the IVE study.

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Notes

  1. In the trust game [18], participants must decide whether to invest money in a partner in an uncertain context. The partner receives this money, multiplied by a factor (usually 3 or 4). The partner must then decide whether to reciprocate the trust by sending back some of the money, resulting in a net gain for both players, or keeping all the money for themselves.

  2. The gender ratio of the participant pools of both experiments is skewed towards female. Although this has no consequence when comparing the results from the two experiments in this work, it may limit the external validity of these studies.

  3. Autonomy (‘How much did you feel the robot acted on its own’) and Robot-like behavior (‘How much did you feel the robot acted like you would expect from a robot’) were also measured as exploratory questions. Their results can be found in the supplementary materials.

  4. A multivariate analysis of variance on all manipulation checks was also performed; apart from the expected main effects shown here, we also found some side effects. These can be found in the appendix.

  5. It is also possible to analyze Experiment 2 by means of the single item measure of trustworthiness, which yields results similar to the analysis of the compound measure reported below.

  6. As in Experiment 1, Autonomy and Robot-like behavior were also measured as exploratory questions at the end of the questionnaire. No significant effects were found for autonomy, all \(F\)s \(<1.1\), all \(p\)s \(> .05\). There was a significant main effect of task performance on robot-like behavior, \(F\)(1,77) = 12.01, \(p <\) .001, \(\eta _p^2 =\) .13, indicating that a well performing robot was judged more robot-like (\(M =\) 4.86, \(SD =\) 1.41) than a badly performing robot (\(M =\) 3.62, \(SD =\) 1.79). No other effects were significant, all \(F\)s \(< 1\), all \(p\)s \(> .05\).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, Montessorilaan 3, 6525 HR , Nijmegen, Netherlands

    Rik van den Brule & Pim Haselager

  2. Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, Montessorilaan 3, 6525 HR , Nijmegen, Netherlands

    Rik van den Brule, Ron Dotsch, Gijsbert Bijlstra & Daniel H. J. Wigboldus

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  1. Rik van den Brule
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Correspondence to Rik van den Brule.

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van den Brule, R., Dotsch, R., Bijlstra, G. et al. Do Robot Performance and Behavioral Style affect Human Trust?. Int J of Soc Robotics 6, 519–531 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-014-0231-5

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