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Article published In: Interaction Studies
Vol. 16:1 (2015) ► pp.89–117

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Towards robots that trust

Human subject validation of the situational conditions for trust

 | Georgia Tech Research Institute |
 | Georgia Tech Research Institute |
Published online: 17 August 2015
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/is.16.1.05wag
This article investigates the challenge of developing a robot capable of determining if a social situation demands trust. Solving this challenge may allow a robot to react when a person over or under trusts the system. Prior work in this area has focused on understanding the factors that influence a person’s trust of a robot (Hancock, P.A., Billings, D.R., Schaefer, K.E., Chen, J.Y., Visser, E.J., & Parasuraman, R. (2011). A meta-analysis of factors affecting trust in human-robot interaction. Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 53(5), 517–527. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). In contrast, by using game-theoretic representations to frame the problem, we are able to develop a set of conditions for determining if an interactive situation demands trust. In two separate experiments, human subjects were asked to evaluate either written narratives or mazes in terms of whether or not they require trust. The results indicate a Φ 1= +0.592 and Φ 2 = +0.406 correlation respectively between the subjects’ evaluations and the condition’s predictions. This is a strong correlation for a study involving human subjects.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Related work
  • 3.Representing interaction
  • 4.Recognizing situations that demand trust
  • 5.Experimental hypotheses
  • 6.Methodology
    • 6.1Trust versus no-trust matrices
  • 7.The narrative experiment
    • 7.1Results
  • 8.Robot guidance experiment
    • 8.1Results
  • 9.Discussion
  • 10.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgment
  • References
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