Anthropomorphic framing and failure comprehensibility influence different facets of trust towards industrial robots

Introduction: Utilizing anthropomorphic features in industrial robots is a prevalent strategy aimed at enhancing their perception as collaborative team partners and promoting increased tolerance for failures. Nevertheless, recent research highlights the presence of potential drawbacks associated with this approach. It is still widely unknown, how anthropomorphic framing influences the dynamics of trust especially, in context of different failure experiences. Method: The current laboratory study wanted to close this research gap. To do so, fifty-one participants interacted with a robot that was either anthropomorphically or technically framed. In addition, each robot produced either a comprehensible or an incomprehensible failure. Results: The analysis revealed no differences in general trust towards the technically and anthropomorphically framed robot. Nevertheless, the anthropomorphic robot was perceived as more transparent than the technical robot. Furthermore, the robot’s purpose was perceived as more positive after experiencing a comprehensible failure. Discussion: The perceived higher transparency of anthropomorphically framed robots might be a double-edged sword, as the actual transparency did not differ between both conditions. In general, the results show that it is essential to consider trust multi-dimensionally, as a uni-dimensional approach which is often focused on performance might overshadow important facets of trust like transparency and purpose.