Experimental Investigation of Trust in Anthropomorphic Agents as Task Partners
This work addresses the problem of trust calibration in human-agent interactions for users of social robots and AI systems, though it is incremental in nature.
The study investigated how anthropomorphic physicality affects human trust in agents by comparing trust levels in a social robot, an AI agent, and a human across calculation and emotion recognition tasks. Results showed that trust in the social robot settled between that in the AI agent and human, suggesting manipulation of anthropomorphic features could help calibrate trust.
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.