Experimental Investigation of Trust in Anthropomorphic Agents as Task Partners

TL;DR

This study explores how anthropomorphic physicality in social robots affects human trust, revealing that trust levels in robots are intermediate between AI agents and humans, and that physical features can help calibrate trust.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on the influence of anthropomorphic features on trust in social robots compared to AI and humans.

Findings

Trust in social robots is intermediate between AI and humans.

Manipulating anthropomorphic features can help calibrate human trust.

Trust levels vary depending on the type of agent and task context.

Abstract

This study investigated whether human trust in a social robot with anthropomorphic physicality is similar to that in an AI agent or in a human in order to clarify how anthropomorphic physicality influences human trust in an agent. We conducted an online experiment using two types of cognitive tasks, calculation and emotion recognition tasks, where participants answered after referring to the answers of an AI agent, a human, or a social robot. During the experiment, the participants rated their trust levels in their partners. As a result, trust in the social robot was basically neither similar to that in the AI agent nor in the human and instead settled between them. The results showed a possibility that manipulating anthropomorphic features would help assist human users in appropriately calibrating trust in an agent.