Trust and Cooperation in Human-Robot Decision Making

Trust plays a key role in social interactions, particularly when the decisions we make depend on the people we face. In this paper, we use game theory to explore whether a person’s decisions are influenced by the type of agent they interact with: human or robot. By adopting a coin entrustment game, we quantitatively measure trust and cooperation to see if such phenomena emerge differently when a person believes they are playing a robot rather than another human. We found that while people cooperate with other humans and robots at a similar rate, they grow to trust robots more completely than humans. As a possible explanation for these differences, our survey results suggest that participants perceive humans as having faculty for feelings and sympathy, whereas they perceive robots as being more precise and reliable.