On the impact of different types of errors on trust in human-robot interaction: Are laboratory-based HRI experiments trustworthy?

Trust is a key dimension of human-robot interaction (HRI), and has often been studied in the HRI community. A common challenge arises from the difficulty of assessing trust levels in ecologically invalid environments: we present in this paper two independent laboratory studies, totalling 160 participants, where we investigate the impact of different types of errors on resulting trust, using both behavioural and subjective measures of trust. While we found a (weak) general effect of errors on reported and observed level of trust, no significant differences between the type of errors were found in either of our studies. We discuss this negative result in light of our experimental protocols, and argue for the community to move towards alternative methodologies to assess trust.