Using Speech to Reduce Loss of Trust in Humanoid Social Robots

TL;DR

This study investigates how speech influences trust in humanoid robots, showing that speaking can significantly mitigate trust loss caused by robot faults, likely due to increased perceived intelligence.

Contribution

It demonstrates that speech can reduce trust loss in humanoid robots exhibiting faults, highlighting the role of perceived intelligence in human-robot trust dynamics.

Findings

Speaking robots mitigate trust loss caused by faults.

Faulty robots with speech are perceived as more intelligent.

Trust is highest with non-faulty, silent robots.

Abstract

We present data from two online human-robot interaction experiments where 227 participants viewed videos of a humanoid robot exhibiting faulty or non-faulty behaviours while either remaining mute or speaking. The participants were asked to evaluate their perception of the robot's trustworthiness, as well as its likeability, animacy, and perceived intelligence. The results show that, while a non-faulty robot achieves the highest trust, an apparently faulty robot that can speak manages to almost completely mitigate the loss of trust that is otherwise seen with faulty behaviour. We theorize that this mitigation is correlated with the increase in perceived intelligence that is also seen when speech is present.