Friendly but faulty: a pilot study on the perceived trust of older adults in a social robot

Giorgi, Ioanna, Tirotto, Francesca Ausilia, Hagen, Oksana, Aider, Farida, Gianni, Mario, Palomino, Marco and Masala, Giovanni L. 2022. Friendly but faulty: a pilot study on the perceived trust of older adults in a social robot. IEEE Access 10 , pp. 92084-92096. 10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3202942

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Abstract

The efforts to promote ageing-in-place of healthy older adults via cybernetic support are fundamental to avoid possible consequences associated with relocation to facilities, including the loss of social ties and autonomy, and feelings of loneliness. This requires an understanding of key factors that affect the involvement of robots in eldercare and the elderly willingness to embrace the robots’ domestic use. Trust is argued to be the main foundation of an effective adult-care provider, which might be more significant if such providers are robots. Establishing, and maintaining trust usually involves two main dimensions: 1) the robot’s reliability (i.e., performance) and 2) the robot’s intrinsic attributes, including its degree of anthropomorphism and benevolence. We conducted a pilot study using a mixed methods approach to explore the extent to which these dimensions and their interaction influenced elderly trust in a humanoid social robot. Using two independent variables, type of attitude (warm, cold) and type of conduct (error, no-error), we aimed to investigate if the older adult participants would trust a purposefully faulty robot when the robot exerted a warm behaviour enhanced with non-functional touch more than a robot that did not, and in what way the robot error affected trust. Lastly, we also investigated the relationship between trust and a proxy variable of actual use of robots (i.e., intention to use robots at home). Given the volatile and context-dependent nature of trust, our close-to real-world scenario of elder-robot interaction involved the administration of health supplements, in which the severity of robot error might have a greater implication on the perceived trust.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Psychology Research Institutes & Centres > Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST)
Publisher:	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
ISSN:	2169-3536
Funders:	Interreg 2 Seas Mers Zeeën
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	4 December 2025
Date of Acceptance:	21 August 2022
Last Modified:	05 Dec 2025 14:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/182891

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