When Would You Trust a Robot? A Study on Trust and Theory of Mind in Human-Robot Interactions

TL;DR

This study explores how a robot's Theory of Mind abilities influence human trust, demonstrating that higher Theory of Mind capabilities in robots lead to increased trust from human users.

Contribution

It is the first experimental investigation into the impact of robot Theory of Mind levels on human trust in human-robot interactions.

Findings

Robots with high Theory of Mind are trusted more than those with low Theory of Mind.

Participants' willingness to accept robot suggestions increased with the robot's Theory of Mind level.

The study highlights the importance of Theory of Mind in designing trustworthy robots.

Abstract

Trust is a critical issue in Human Robot Interactions as it is the core of human desire to accept and use a non human agent. Theory of Mind has been defined as the ability to understand the beliefs and intentions of others that may differ from one's own. Evidences in psychology and HRI suggest that trust and Theory of Mind are interconnected and interdependent concepts, as the decision to trust another agent must depend on our own representation of this entity's actions, beliefs and intentions. However, very few works take Theory of Mind of the robot into consideration while studying trust in HRI. In this paper, we investigated whether the exposure to the Theory of Mind abilities of a robot could affect humans' trust towards the robot. To this end, participants played a Price Game with a humanoid robot that was presented having either low level Theory of Mind or high level Theory of Mind. Specifically, the participants were asked to accept the price evaluations on common objects presented by the robot. The willingness of the participants to change their own price judgement of the objects (i.e., accept the price the robot suggested) was used as the main measurement of the trust towards the robot. Our experimental results showed that robots possessing a high level of Theory of Mind abilities were trusted more than the robots presented with low level Theory of Mind skills.