Trust in robotics: A multi-staged decision-making approach to robots in community

• Main Authors: ZHANG, Wenxi, WONG, Willow, FINDLAY, Mark
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2022
• Subjects: Social robots; Acceptability and trust; Design and human factors; Ethics and governance; Artificial Intelligence and Robotics; Science and Technology Law; Science and Technology Policy
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/caidg/11; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/caidg/article/1010/viewcontent/TrustinRobots_wp_2022.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Pivoting on the desired outcome of social good within the wider robotics ecosystem, trust is identified as the central adhesive of the HRI interface. However, building trust between humans and robots involves more than improving the machine’s technical reliability or trustworthiness in function. This paper presents a holistic, community-based approach to trust-building, where trust is understood as a multifaceted and multi-staged looped relation that depends heavily on context and human perceptions. Building on past literature that identifies dispositional and learned stages of trust, our proposed Decision to Trust model considers more extensively the human and situational factors influencing how trust manifests within social relations. Priority is given to the human user of technology – the initiator of human-robot trust relations – at all stages of decision-making. The envisioned formation of optimal conditions in which trust emerges requires the collective participation of practitioners, policymakers, and members of the community. With trust facilitating the smooth transition of robots into more socially embedded roles, positive receptivity of the best engineering project arises from the presence of harmonious robot-human trust relations in community spaces. Other catalysts for decision making, such as the alternative influence of power in motivating wider deployment of social robots, are also addressed in this paper.