Social Conformity Effects on Trust in Simulation

We investigated the co-acting influences of communication and social conformity on trust in human-robot interaction. Previous work has investigated aspects of the robot, the human, and the environment as influential factors in the human-robot relationship. Little work has examined the conjoint effects of social conformity and communication on this relationship. As social conformity and communication have been shown to affect human-human trust, there are a priori reasons to believe that they will play an influential role in human-robot trust also. The experiment examined the influences of social conformity and robot communication on trust. A 2 × 2 (communication × social group) design was implemented with each variable having two levels (communication, no communication; positive social group, negative social group). We created a communication manipulation which we then demonstrated to mediate the trust level between human and robot. However, this influence on trust was overcome by social information in which the subsequent trust level, attributed to the robot, was dominated by expressed social group attitudes to that robot. The results confirm the importance of human social assessments over direct robot communication in setting human-robot trust levels. When social opinions are expressed, observers appear to conform to the trust displayed by the group than relying on their own judgment. In human-robot teams, the perceptions of the group may exert a greater impact than even robot communication. This may be especially important when new human members are introduced into such teams