Putting Robots in Context: Challenging the Influence of Voice and Empathic Behaviour on Trust

Paper in proceeding, 2023

Trust is essential for social interactions, including those between humans and social artificial agents, such as robots. Several robot-related factors can contribute to the formation of trust. However, previous work has often treated trust as an absolute concept, whereas it is highly context-dependent, and it is possible that some robot-related features will influence trust in some contexts, but not in others. In this paper, we present the results of two video-based online studies aimed at investigating the role of robot voice and empathic behaviour on trust formation in a general context as well as in a task-specific context. We found that voice influences trust in the specific context, with no effect of voice or empathic behaviour in the general context. Thus, context mediated whether robot-related features play a role in people's trust formation towards robots.