Do You Trust Me? Investigating the Formation of Trust in Social Robots

摘要

Human beings live in a society with a complex system of social-emotional relations. Trust is one key concept in this system. It can help to reduce the social complexity, mainly in those cases where it is necessary to cooperate. Thus, the area of social robotics has been studying different approaches to perform cooperative tasks between humans and robots. Here, we examine the influence of a set of factors (gender, emotional representation, making Small Talk and embodiment) that may affect the trustworthiness of a robot. The results showed that these factors influence the level of trust that people put in robots. Specifically, a social robot with embodiment telling a sad story with sad facial expression and gestures has more influence on the trust level of a female subject.