Trust in humans and robots: Economically similar but emotionally different

Abstract

Trust-based interactions with robots are increasingly common in the marketplace, workplace, on the road, and in the home. However, a looming concern is that people may not trust robots as they do humans. While trust in fellow humans has been studied extensively, little is known about how people extend trust to robots. Here we compare trust-based investments and emotions from across three nearly identical economic games: human-human trust games, human-robot trust games, and human-robot trust games where the robot decision impacts another human. Robots in our experiment mimic humans: they are programmed to make reciprocity decisions based on previously observed behaviors by humans in analogous situations. We find that people invest similarly in humans and robots. By contrast, the social emotions elicited by the interactions (but not non-social emotions) differed across human and robot trust games, and did so lawfully. Emotional reactions depended on how one's trust game decision interacted with the partnered agent's decision, and whether another person was affected economically and emotionally.

Exploring Human-Robot Trust Through the Investment Game

“…The amount invested by the trustor turns out to reflect a mixture of the generalised trust (a stable individual characteristic) and the specific trust towards the trustee [21]. So while most studies kept the original setup, some extended the environment towards a virtual reality setup [21], settings with multiple robots [18,54] or switched the roles so that the human becomes the trustee dependant on the robot's willingness to invest [47]. Other variants such as the Give-Some Game slightly change the rules towards an economic analogue of the prisoner's dilemma [13,14].…”

Promises and trust in human–robot interaction

“…Nonetheless, while the importance of emotions in driving the choice of a human to trust another human has been highly studied, less evidence is available when the decision to trust involves the interaction between artificial agents and humans ( 7 , 21 , 23 ). Moreover, we know that trust is highly culturally based, and that the appearance of the robot (especially its human-likeness, see 24 ) affects the emotions perceived by its interlocutors.…”

Promises and partnership in human-robot interaction

“…A lesson learned from previous research (e.g. economics, neuroeconomics, psychology) is that (general) trust is deeply rooted in social experiences, being more a matter of culture than genetics [1], and highly affected by the emotional states of the individuals [6,7,8]. Indeed, emotions have been proven to play a fundamental role in the decision-making process in general [9], as confirmed among other neuroscientists, by Damasio and colleagues in their studies [10,11,12,13].…”

“…Nonetheless, while the importance of emotions in driving the choice of a human to trust another human has been highly studied, less evidence is available when the decision to trust involves the interaction between artificial agents and humans ( [23], [7,21]). Moreover, we know that trust is highly culturally based, and that the appearance of the robot (especially its human-likeness, see [24]) affects the emotions perceived by its interlocutors.…”