Is it personal? The impact of personally relevant robotic failures (PeRFs) on humans' trust, likeability, and willingness to use the robot

TL;DR

This study investigates how personally relevant robotic failures influence human trust, likeability, and willingness to use robots, revealing that personal relevance can significantly impact user perceptions in collaborative tasks.

Contribution

The paper introduces the concept of personally relevant failures (PeRFs) and examines their effects on human perceptions of robots through three experimental manipulations.

Findings

PeRFs reduce trust in robots in certain failure scenarios.

The impact of PeRFs varies depending on the type of failure manipulation.

Differences exist in perception between interaction failures and technical failures.

Abstract

In three laboratory experiments, we examine the impact of personally relevant failures (PeRFs) on perceptions of a collaborative robot. PeR is determined by how much a specific issue applies to a particular person, i.e., it affects one's own goals and values. We hypothesized that PeRFs would reduce trust in the robot and the robot's Likeability and Willingness to Use (LWtU) more than failures that are not personal to participants. To achieve PeR in human-robot interaction, we utilized three different manipulation mechanisms: A) damage to property, B) financial loss, and C) first-person versus third-person failure scenarios. In total, 132 participants engaged with a robot in person during a collaborative task of laundry sorting. All three experiments took place in the same experimental environment, carefully designed to simulate a realistic laundry sorting scenario. Results indicate that the impact of PeRFs on perceptions of the robot varied across the studies. In experiments A and B, the encounters with PeRFs reduced trust significantly relative to a no failure session. But not entirely for LWtU. In experiment C, the PeR manipulation had no impact. The work highlights challenges and adjustments needed for studying robotic failures in laboratory settings. We show that PeR manipulations affect how users perceive a failing robot. The results bring about new questions regarding failure types and their perceived severity on users' perception of the robot. Putting PeR aside, we observed differences in the way users perceive interaction failures compared (experiment C) to how they perceive technical ones (A and B).