The Effects of Robots’ Altruistic Behaviours and Reciprocity on Human-robot Trust

Trust is an important factor in human-robot interaction, it plays an important role in improving human acceptance of robots and building human-robot relationships. Today, when robots are more intelligent and the human-robot relationships is more intimate, the social attributes of robots and interaction scenarios are important factors affecting human-robot trust. Altruistic behaviour is a typical social behaviour, and reciprocity is a typical social interaction scenario. So, this study investigates the effects of reciprocity and robots’ altruistic behaviours on cognitive trust, emotional trust, behavioural trust and the mediating role of perceived intelligence. An experiment involving 42 participants was conducted. The virtual robots used in the experiment have three different behaviours: altruistic, selfish and control, and two interactive scenarios in the experiment: reciprocity and non-reciprocity. Participants in our study played the adapted Repeated Public Goods Game and the Trust Game with robot in two scenarios. The results indicate that robots’ altruistic behaviours significantly influence participants’ cognitive trust, emotional trust and behavioural trust, and reciprocity significantly influences only emotional trust and behavioural trust. Both robots’ altruistic behaviours and reciprocity positively influence perceived intelligence. Perceived intelligence mediates the effects of robots’ altruistic behaviours on cognitive and emotional trust and the effect of reciprocity on emotional trust. Implications are discussed for future work.