Exploring Factors Affecting User Trust Across Different Human-Robot Interaction Settings and Cultures

Trust is one of the necessary factors for building a successful human-robot interaction (HRI). This paper investigated how human trust in robots differs across HRI scenarios in two cultures. We conducted two studies in two countries: Saudi Arabia (study 1) and the United Kingdom (study 2). Each study presented three HRI scenarios: a dog robot guiding people with sight impairments, a teleoperated robot in healthcare, and a manufacturing robot. Study 1 shows that participants’ trust perception score (TPS) was significantly different across the three scenarios. However, Study 2 results show a slightly significant variation in TPS across the scenarios. We also found that the relevance of trust for a given task is an indicator of a participant’s trust. Furthermore, the findings showed that trust scores or factors affecting users’ trust vary across cultures. The findings identified novel factors that might affect human trust, such as controllability, usability and risk. The findings direct the HRI community to consider a dynamic and evolving design for modelling human-robot trust because factors affecting humans’ trust are evolving and will vary across different settings and cultures.