Establishing Trust in Human-Robot Interaction The Significance of Social and Personal Distance

Establishing Trust in Human-Robot Interaction The Significance of Social and Personal Distance Tiffani Walker, Theresa Kessler, Tracy Sanders, Elizabeth Schafer, Tyler Wild and P.A. Hancock Department of Psychology, University of Central Florida Automation has become much more than a suggestion over recent years. It has become an essential tool in daily life, especially for those in the military field. Due to this increasing frequency of daily practice, social issues continuously emerge between humans and automation. This gives birth to an important on-going examination between Human-Robot Interactions (HRI). Previous research has studied the distance participants left between themselves and different types of robots (Walters et al., 2009). However they did not examine trust levels based on situational interpersonal distances between participants and robots. This experiment aimed to shed light on variables, mainly that of proximity, explicit relationships (i.e., teammate vs bystander) and interpersonal distance. These should be taken into consideration on how they may influence the amount of trust an individual has toward a robot counterpart. The present study employed (N = 78) human participants, which included 27 males and 51 females. Participants were required to complete the Demographics Questionnaire, the Mini-IPIP, the Negative Attitudes towards Robots Scale (NARS) and finally a Pre-Interaction Trust Scale. These various scales were assigned in order to familiarize the researcher of any distinct personality traits and or pre-existing perceptions towards robots that could mediate the outcome of the data. The participants viewed four videos. In all four videos the participants were informed that they were either a i) bystander or ii) teammate of the robot. In addition, the robot stayed out of touch distance of the participant’s avatar in two videos but remained within touching distance in the other two videos. We hypothesized that trust level would be contingent on the “relationship” condition, therefore trust ratings would be significantly higher in the “teammate” conditions compared to the “bystander” conditions. In addition, we believed trust would be mediated by Proximity (Within-Touch Distance vs. Beyond-Touch Distance). Our results suggested no significant effects based on proximity, stated relationship, or an interaction between the two. This could have resulted from the lack of role differentiation and or mainly the use of virtual conditions versus real world conditions