Biblio

The success of human-robot interaction is strongly affected by the people’s ability to infer others’ intentions and behaviours, and the level of people’s trust that others will abide by their same principles and social conventions to achieve a common goal. The ability of understanding and reasoning about other agents’ mental states is known as Theory of Mind (ToM). ToM and trust, therefore, are key factors in the positive outcome of human-robot interaction. We believe that a robot endowed with a ToM is able to gain people’s trust, even when this may occasionally make errors.In this work, we present a user study in the field in which participants (N=123) interacted with a robot that may or may not have a ToM, and may or may not exhibit erroneous behaviour. Our findings indicate that a robot with ToM is perceived as more reliable, and they trusted it more than a robot without a ToM even when the robot made errors. Finally, ToM results to be a key driver for tuning people’s trust in the robot even when the initial condition of the interaction changed (i.e., loss and regain of trust in a longer relationship).

Trust is a critical issue in human-robot interactions (HRI) as it is the core of human desire to accept and use a non-human agent. Theory of Mind (ToM) has been defined as the ability to understand the beliefs and intentions of others that may differ from one's own. Evidences in psychology and HRI suggest that trust and ToM are interconnected and interdependent concepts, as the decision to trust another agent must depend on our own representation of this entity's actions, beliefs and intentions. However, very few works take ToM of the robot into consideration while studying trust in HRI. In this paper, we investigated whether the exposure to the ToM abilities of a robot could affect humans' trust towards the robot. To this end, participants played a Price Game with a humanoid robot (Pepper) that was presented having either low-level ToM or high-level ToM. Specifically, the participants were asked to accept the price evaluations on common objects presented by the robot. The willingness of the participants to change their own price judgement of the objects (i.e., accept the price the robot suggested) was used as the main measurement of the trust towards the robot. Our experimental results showed that robots possessing a high-level of ToM abilities were trusted more than the robots presented with low-level ToM skills.