Evaluating People’s Perception of Trust and Privacy based on Robot’s Appearance

This work studies the impact of a robot’s appearanceon how people judge robots’ trustworthiness in a publicspace scenario. An online experimental study was conducted toinvestigate the effect of the robot’s appearance on the perceptionof its role and on participants’ willingness to comply with therobot’s request to share sensitive information. The context ofthe interaction and the robot’s role was presented to the participantsusing a pre-recorded video filmed from a first-personperspective, encountering and interacting with a Pepper robotat a foreign University. We recruited 54 participants of differentages and nationalities. Each participant was tested with oneof the three conditions in which the robot played the samerole (which was not explicitly conveyed to the participants) butwith a different disguise. Qualitative and quantitative measureswere used to collect participants’ responses to evaluate theirtrust perception in showing their ID documents to the robotand letting the robot take a picture of them. Results showedthat the context of interaction played a big part in helpingthe participants infer the robot’s role and the judgment ofsensitivity of the information. Our findings provide insights anda better understanding of how to design a trustworthy robotfor a privacy-sensitive human-robot interaction (HRI).