Robot humorous apologies help rebuild trust after minor errors
Toward Study on the Effects of Robot's Humorous Apology on Human's Trust Recovery
Robotics
Summary
When robots make mistakes, people may trust them less and hesitate to work with them. The authors studied whether a funny apology from a robot can help people trust it again. They tested this idea with different levels of robot mistakes and apology types. They think that humor will help more after small mistakes but might not help after big ones.
What this means in practice
- •For robotics developers: Design robot apology behaviors to use humor for improving human trust recovery after minor errors in collaborative tasks.
- •For customer service chatbot teams: Incorporate humorous apology strategies after low-severity interaction failures to potentially improve user trust and acceptance.
Tested on simulated data.
Authors
Gayoung Kim, Go-Eum Cha, Wonse Jo
Abstract
Robot errors can disrupt human-robot collaboration by reducing user trust and willingness to rely on the robot. Robot apologies can support trust recovery after such errors, but their effects may vary with apology strategy and error severity. This study therefore presents a user experiment based on a 2x2 between-subjects factorial design to examine the effect of humorous robot apologies on user trust recovery and the moderating role of error severity. The design crosses robot error severity (low vs. high) with apology strategy (generic vs. humorous). An online experiment will be conducted using the open-source Warehouse Robot Interaction Simulator. Participants will complete a collaborative task, experience a robot error followed by an apology, and report trust, trust recovery, interaction experience and reuse intention. We hypothesize that humorous apologies will produce greater trust recovery than generic apologies after low-severity errors, but that the advantage of humor will weaken or reverse after high-severity errors.