The effect of perceived involvement on trust in human-robot interaction

Abstract

Trust serves as a powerful social capacity that can influence the course of a relationship, either spurring a willingness or refusal of one agent to interact with another. As we attempt to build increasingly complex and useful social robots, we must consider what factors will engender such trust and thus benefit human-robot interaction. In this paper we describe a line of inquiry that is investigating how a person's perceived involvement in helping a robot recover from failure affects the person's trust in the robot and in its future actions. We posit that a person's active involvement with a robot, compared with passive observation, will lead to greater trust in the robot.