Perceived role of physiological sensors impacts trust and reliance on robots

Abstract

Physiological sensors can be instrumental in facilitating complex behavioral and social interactions between humans and robots. However, there is a limited understanding of the psychological implications of incorporating such sensors in the context of human-robot interaction. We show that perception of sensors' role can act as an individual difference factor that can implicitly influence trust and reliance on a robot. We argue that some people may believe in the ability of physiological sensors to facilitate mentalization (or understanding) of humans. We refer to this tendency as mentalizing propensity. Such implicit differences in mentalizing propensity may influence participants' trust and reliance on a robot, as found in the current study. We also found that trust can mediate the influence of mentalizing propensity on reliance. Furthermore, we show that social interactions with a robot influenced participants' mentalizing propensity. The current work shows that implicit understanding of sensors' role in human-robot interaction context is an important attribute to assess in future studies on trust and reliance.