Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The Effects of Robots’ Altruistic Behaviours and Reciprocity on Human-robot Trust

  • Published:
International Journal of Social Robotics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Trust is an important factor in human-robot interaction, it plays an important role in improving human acceptance of robots and building human-robot relationships. Today, when robots are more intelligent and the human-robot relationships is more intimate, the social attributes of robots and interaction scenarios are important factors affecting human-robot trust. Altruistic behaviour is a typical social behaviour, and reciprocity is a typical social interaction scenario. So, this study investigates the effects of reciprocity and robots’ altruistic behaviours on cognitive trust, emotional trust, behavioural trust and the mediating role of perceived intelligence. An experiment involving 42 participants was conducted. The virtual robots used in the experiment have three different behaviours: altruistic, selfish and control, and two interactive scenarios in the experiment: reciprocity and non-reciprocity. Participants in our study played the adapted Repeated Public Goods Game and the Trust Game with robot in two scenarios. The results indicate that robots’ altruistic behaviours significantly influence participants’ cognitive trust, emotional trust and behavioural trust, and reciprocity significantly influences only emotional trust and behavioural trust. Both robots’ altruistic behaviours and reciprocity positively influence perceived intelligence. Perceived intelligence mediates the effects of robots’ altruistic behaviours on cognitive and emotional trust and the effect of reciprocity on emotional trust. Implications are discussed for future work.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Hancock PA, Billings DR, Schaefer KE, Chen JY, De Visser EJ, Parasuraman R (2011) A meta-analysis of factors affecting trust in human-robot interaction. Hum Factors 53(5):517–527. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018720811417254

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Lee JJ, Knox B, Baumann J, Breazeal C, DeSteno D (2013) Computationally modeling interpersonal trust. Front Psychol 4:893. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00893

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Haring KS, Matsumoto Y, Watanabe K (2013) How do people perceive and trust a lifelike robot. In: Proceedings of the world congress on engineering and computer science, San Francisco, USA, pp 1–6

  4. Sale, M, Lakatos G, Amirabdollahian F, Dautenhahn K (2015) Would you trust a (faulty) robot? Effects of error, task type and personality on human-robot cooperation and trust. In: 10th ACM/IEEE international conference on human-robot interaction (HRI), IEEE, pp 1–8.

  5. McAllister DJ (1995) Affect-and cognition-based trust as foundations for interpersonal cooperation in organizations. Acad Manag J 38(1):24–59. https://doi.org/10.5465/256727

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  6. Schaubroeck J, Lam SS, Peng AC (2011) Cognition-based and affect-based trust as mediators of leader behavior influences on team performance. J Appl Psychol 96(4):863. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022625

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Gouldner AW (1960) The norm of reciprocity: a preliminary statement. Am Sociol Rev 25(2):161–178. https://doi.org/10.2307/2092623

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Fogg BJ, Nass C (1997) How users reciprocate to computers: an experiment that demonstrates behavior change. In: CHI'97 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, NewYork, NY, USA, pp 331–332. https://doi.org/10.1145/1120212.1120419

  9. Lee SA, Liang Y (2016) The role of reciprocity in verbally persuasive robots. Cyberpsychol Behav Soc Netw 19(8):524–527. https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2016.0124

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Salem M, Rohlfing K, Kopp S, Joublin F (2011) A friendly gesture: investigating the effect of multimodal robot behavior in human-robot interaction. In: 2011 Ro-Man, IEEE, pp 247–252. https://doi.org/10.1109/ROMAN.2011.6005285

  11. Häring M, Eichberg J, André E (2012) Studies on grounding with gaze and pointing gestures in human-robot-interaction. In: International conference on social robotics, Springer, Singapore, pp 378–387. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34103-8_38

  12. Bartneck C, Croft E, Kulic D (2008) Measuring the anthropomorphism, animacy, likeability, perceived intelligence and perceived safety of robots. In: Proceedings of the metrics for human-robot interaction workshop in affiliation with the 3rd ACM/IEEE international conference on human-robot interaction (HRI 2008), Technical Report 471, Amsterdam, pp 37-44. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5154805

  13. Powers A, Kiesler S, Fussell S, Torrey C (2007) Comparing a computer agent with a humanoid robot. In: Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction, pp 145–152. https://doi.org/10.1145/1228716.1228736

  14. Bainbridge WA, Hart JW, Kim ES, Scassellati B (2011) The benefits of interactions with physically present robots over video-displayed agents. Int J Soc Robotics 3(1):41–52. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-010-0082-7

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Batson CD, Powell AA (2003) Altruism and prosocial behavior. Handb Psychol. https://doi.org/10.1002/0471264385.wei0519

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Penner LA, Dovidio JF, Piliavin JA, Schroeder DA (2005) Prosocial behavior: multilevel perspectives. Annu Rev Psychol 56:365–392. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.56.091103.070141

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Leider S, Möbiu MM, Rosenblat T, Do Q-A (2009) Directed altruism and enforced reciprocity in social networks. Q J Econ 124(4):1815–1851. https://doi.org/10.1162/qjec.2009.124.4.1815

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Jordan JJ, Rand DG, Arbesman S, Fowler JH, Christakis NA (2013) Contagion of cooperation in static and fluid social networks. PLoS ONE 8(6):e66199. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0066199

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Christakis NA, Fowler JH (2009) Connected: The surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives. Little, Brown Spark

    Google Scholar 

  20. Fowler JH, Christakis NA (2010) Cooperative behavior cascades in human social networks. Proc Natl Acad Sci 107(12):5334–5338. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0913149107

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Hill AL, Rand DG, Nowak MA, Christakis NA (2010) Emotions as infectious diseases in a large social network: the SISa model. Proc Royal Soc B: Biol Sci 277(1701):3827–3835. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2010.1217

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Hill AL, Rand DG, Nowak MA, Christakis NA (2010) Infectious disease modeling of social contagion in networks. PLoS Comput Biol 6(11):e1000968. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000968

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  23. Keser C, Van Winden F (2000) Conditional cooperation and voluntary contributions to public goods. Scand J Econ 102(1):23–39. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9442.00182

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Kocher MG, Cherry T, Kroll S, Netzer RJ, Sutter M (2008) Conditional cooperation on three continents. Econ Lett 101(3):175–178. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2008.07.015

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Imre M, Oztop E, Nagai Y, Ugur E (2019) Affordance-based altruistic robotic architecture for human-robot collaboration. Adapt Behav 27(4):223–241. https://doi.org/10.1177/1059712318824697

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Correia F, Mascarenhas SF, Gomes S et al (2019) Exploring prosociality in human-robot teams. In: 14th ACM/IEEE international conference on human-robot interaction (HRI), IEEE, pp 143–151. https://doi.org/10.1109/HRI.2019.8673299

  27. Yasumatsu Y, Sono T, Hasegawa K, Imai M (2017) I can help you: Altruistic behaviors from children towards a robot at a kindergarten. In: Proceedings of the companion of the 2017 ACM/IEEE international conference on human-robot interaction, pp 331–332. https://doi.org/10.1145/3029798.3038305

  28. De Kleijn R, van Es L, Kachergis G, Hommel B (2019) Anthropomorphization of artificial agents leads to fair and strategic, but not altruistic behavior. Int J Hum Comput Stud 122:168–173. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2018.09.008

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Nishio S, Ogawa K, Kanakogi Y, Itakura S, Ishiguro H (2018) Do robot appearance and speech affect people’s attitude? Evaluation through the ultimatum game. In: Geminoid Studies, Springer, Singapore, pp 263–277. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8702-8_16

  30. Duffy BR (2003) Anthropomorphism and the social robot. Robot Auton Syst 42(3–4):177–190. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0921-8890(02)00374-3

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  31. Fehr E, Gächter S (1998) Reciprocity and economics: the economic implications of homo reciprocans. Eur Econ Rev 42(3–5):845–859. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0014-2921(97)00131-1

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Hsieh TY, Chaudhury B, Cross ES (2020) Human-Robot Cooperation in prisoner dilemma games: people behave more reciprocally than prosocially toward robots. In: companion of the 2020 ACM/IEEE international conference on human-robot interaction, pp 257–259. https://doi.org/10.1145/3371382.3378309

  33. Luria M (2018) Designing robot personality based on fictional sidekick characters. In: companion of the 2018 ACM/IEEE international conference on human-robot interaction, pp 307–308. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173386.3176912

  34. Fraune MR, Oisted BC, Sembrowski CE, Gates KA, Krupp MM, Šabanović S (2020) Effects of robot-human versus robot-robot behavior and entitativity on anthropomorphism and willingness to interact. Comput Hum Behav 105:106220. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.106220

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Muscolo GG, Recchiuto CT, Campatelli G, Molfino R (2013) A robotic social reciprocity in children with autism spectrum disorder. In: 5th international conference on social robotics, ICSR, pp 574–575.

  36. Sandoval EB, Brandstetter J, Obaid M, Bartneck C (2016) Reciprocity in human-robot interaction: a quantitative approach through the prisoner’s dilemma and the ultimatum game. Int J Soc Robotics 8(2):303–17. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-015-0323-x

    Article  Google Scholar 

  37. Broadbent E, Peri K, Kerse N, Jayawardena C, Kuo I, Datta C, MacDonald B (2014) Robots in older people’s homes to improve medication adherence and quality of life: a randomised cross-over trial. In: International conference on social robotics, Springer, Cham, pp 64–73. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11973-1_7

  38. Kahn PH, Friedman B, Perez-Granados DR, Freier NG (2006) Robotic pets in the lives of preschool children. Interact Stud 7(3):405–436. https://doi.org/10.1145/985921.986087

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. Kiesler S, Sproull L, Waters K (1996) A prisoner’s dilemma experiment on cooperation with people and human-like computers. J Pers Soc Psychol 70(1):47. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.70.1.47

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Sandoval EB, Brandstatter J, Yalcin U, Bartneck C (2020) Robot likeability and reciprocity in human robot interaction: using ultimatum game to determinate reciprocal likeable robot strategies. Int J Soc Robot. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-020-00658-5

    Article  Google Scholar 

  41. Chidambaram V, Chiang YH, Mutlu B (2012) Designing persuasive robots: how robots might persuade people using vocal and nonverbal cues. In: Proceedings of the seventh annual ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-Robot Interaction, pp 293–300. https://doi.org/10.1145/2157689.2157798

  42. Stoll B, Edwards C, Edwards A (2016) “Why aren’t you a sassy little thing”: the effects of robot-enacted guilt trips on credibility and consensus in a negotiation. Commun Stud 67(5):530–547. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510974.2016.1215339

    Article  Google Scholar 

  43. Fogg B, Nass C (1997) How users reciprocate to computers: an experiment that demonstrates behavior change. In: CHI ’97 extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems, CHI EA ’97. ACM, New York, pp 331–332. doi:https://doi.org/10.1145/1120212.1120419

  44. Dunn J, Ruedy NE, Schweitzer ME (2012) It hurts both ways: How social comparisons harm affective and cognitive trust. Organ Behav Hum Decis Process 117(1):2–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2011.08.001

    Article  Google Scholar 

  45. Billing DR, Schaefer KE, Chen JY, Hancock PA (2012) Human-robot interaction: developing trust in robots. In: Proceedings of the seventh annual ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-Robot Interaction, pp 109–110. https://doi.org/10.1145/2157689.2157709

  46. Chen M, Nikolaidis S, Soh H, Hsu D, Srinivasa S (2018) Planning with trust for human-robot collaboration. In: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/IEEE international conference on human-robot interaction, pp 307–315. https://doi.org/10.1145/3171221.3171264

  47. Freedy A, DeVisser E, Weltman G, Coeyman N (2007) Measurement of trust in human-robot collaboration. In: 2007 international symposium on collaborative technologies and systems, IEEE, pp 106–114. https://doi.org/10.1109/CTS.2007.4621745

  48. Komiak SY, Benbasat I (2006) The effects of personalization and familiarity on trust and adoption of recommendation agents. MIS Q 30(4):941–960. https://doi.org/10.2307/25148760

    Article  Google Scholar 

  49. Van Den Brule R, Dotsch R, Bijlstra G, Wigboldus DH, Haselager P (2014) Do robot performance and behavioral style affect human trust? Int J Soc Robot 6(4):519–531. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-014-0231-5

    Article  Google Scholar 

  50. Antos D, De Melo C, Gratch J, Grosz B (2011) The influence of emotion expression on perceptions of trustworthiness in negotiation. In: Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence, San Francisco, CA, pp 772–778. https://dl.acm.org/doi/https://doi.org/10.5555/2900423.2900546

  51. Schaefer KE (2013) The perception and measurement of humanrobot trust. Doctoral dissertation. University of Central Florida Orlando, Florida

    Google Scholar 

  52. Gompei T, Umemuro H (2018) Factors and development of cognitive and affective trust on social robots. In: International conference on social robotics, Springer, Cham, pp 45–54. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05204-1_5

  53. Haring KS, Silvera-Tawil D, Matsumoto Y, Velonaki M, Watanabe K (2014) Perception of an android robot in Japan and Australia: a cross-cultural comparison. In: International conference on social robotics, Springer, Cham, pp 166–175. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11973-1_17

  54. Paeng E, Wu J, Boerkoel J (2016) Human-robot trust and cooperation through a game theoretic framework. In: Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on artificial intelligence, San Francisco, CA, pp 4246–4247. https://dl.acm.org/doi/https://doi.org/10.5555/3016387.3016539

  55. Deligianis C, Stanton CJ, McGarty C, Stevens CJ (2017) The impact of intergroup bias on trust and approach behaviour towards a humanoid robot. J Human-Robot Interact 6(3):4–20. https://doi.org/10.5898/JHRI.6.3.Deligianis

    Article  Google Scholar 

  56. Williams MA (2012) Robot social intelligence. In: International conference on social robotics, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 45–55. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34103-8_5

  57. Albrecht K (2006) Social intelligence: the new science of success. Hoboken, New Jersey

    Google Scholar 

  58. Johnston B, Williams MA (2009) Autonomous learning of commonsense simulations. In: Commonsense 2009-Proceedings of the 9th international symposium on logical formalizations of commonsense reasoning, pp 73–78

  59. Mirnig N, Stollnberger G, Miksch M et al (2017) To Err Is Robot: how humans assess and act toward an erroneous social Robot. Front Robot AI 4:1–15. https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2017.00021

    Article  Google Scholar 

  60. Ragni M, Rudenko A, Kuhnert B, Arras KO (2016) Errare humanum est: Erroneous robots in human-robot interaction. In: 25th IEEE international symposium on robot and human interactive communication (RO-MAN), IEEE, pp 501–506. https://doi.org/10.1109/ROMAN.2016.7745164

  61. Churamani N, Anton P, Brügger M et al (2017) The impact of personalisation on human-robot interaction in learning scenarios. In: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on human agent interaction, ACM, pp 171–180. https://doi.org/10.1145/3125739.3125756

  62. Punyatoya P (2019) Effects of cognitive and affective trust on online customer behavior. Mark Intell Plan 37(1):80–96. https://doi.org/10.1108/MIP-02-2018-0058

    Article  Google Scholar 

  63. Barclay P (2004) Trustworthiness and competitive altruism can also solve the “tragedy of the commons.” Evol Hum Behav 25(4):209–220. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2004.04.002

    Article  Google Scholar 

  64. Yamakawa T, Okano Y, Saijo T (2016) Detecting motives for cooperation in public goods experiments. Exp Econ 19(2):500–512. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-015-9451-2

    Article  Google Scholar 

  65. DeVellis RF (2016) Scale development: theory and applications. Los Angeles, USA

    Google Scholar 

  66. Clark J (2002) Recognizing large donations to public goods: an experimental test. Manag Decis Econ 23(1):33–44. https://doi.org/10.1002/mde.1044

    Article  Google Scholar 

  67. Johnson D, Grayson K (2005) Cognitive and affective trust in service relationships. J Bus Res 58(4):500–507. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0148-2963(03)00140-1

    Article  Google Scholar 

  68. Correia F, Mascarenhas S, Prada R, Melo FS, Paiva A (2018) Group-based emotions in teams of humans and robots. In: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/IEEE international conference on human-robot interaction, pp 261–269. https://dl.acm.org/doi/https://doi.org/10.1145/3171221.3171252

  69. Toumbourou JW (2016) Beneficial action within altruistic and prosocial behavior. Rev Gen Psychol 20(3):245–258

    Article  Google Scholar 

  70. Van Den Bos W, van Dijk E, Westenberg M, Rombouts SA, Crone EA (2009) What motivates repayment? neural correlates of reciprocity in the trust game. Soc Cognit Affect Neurosci 4(3):294–304. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsp009

    Article  Google Scholar 

  71. Dohmen T, Falk A, Huffman D, Sunde U (2008) Representative trust and reciprocity: prevalence and determinants. Econ Inq 46(1):84–90. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1465-7295.2007.00082.x

    Article  Google Scholar 

  72. Wang L, Rau PLP, Evers V, Robinson BK, Hinds P (2010) When in Rome: the role of culture & context in adherence to robot recommendations. In: The 5th ACM/IEEE international conference on human-robot interaction (HRI), IEEE, pp 359–366. https://doi.org/10.1145/1734454.1734578

  73. Evers V, Maldonado H, Brodecki T, Hinds P (2008) Relational vs. group self-construal: Untangling the role of national culture in HRI. In: 2008 3rd ACM/IEEE international conference on human-robot interaction (HRI), IEEE, pp 255–262. https://doi.org/10.1145/1349822.1349856

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the support of Ministry of Education of Humanities and Social Science project, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Beijing Social Science Fund and Major Research plan of the National Natural Science Foundation of China. Additionally, we wish to thank the other members in the college of Economics and Management for their useful advice and good ideas. Availability of data and material The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding. author on reasonable request.

Funding

This study was funded by a Ministry of Education of Humanities and Social Science project (19YJC840002), a National Natural Science Foundation of China (71942005), a Beijing Social Science Fund (17SRC021) and a Major Research plan of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71532003).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing, China

    Na Chen, Yanan Zhai & Xiaoyu Liu

Authors
  1. Na Chen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Yanan Zhai
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Xiaoyu Liu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Na Chen.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Chen, N., Zhai, Y. & Liu, X. The Effects of Robots’ Altruistic Behaviours and Reciprocity on Human-robot Trust. Int J of Soc Robotics 14, 1913–1931 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-022-00899-6

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-022-00899-6

Keywords

Search

Navigation