People More Likely to Trust Robots than their Own Intuition, Study Finds

Researchers reveal that they may be considered authority figures.

As part of a long term study about robots and trust, sponsored in part by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, a team of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology had 42 volunteers follow a robot guide out of an office building in a simulated emergency situation — the results were  very unexpected.

The participants were asked to follow a robot with a sign that said “Emergency Guide Robot” to a conference room where they were asked to read unrelated magazine articles and complete a survey about robots. After a while, the hallway outside was filled with artificial smoke and the smoke detector went off. Participants could then follow the robot back outside the building.

That may seem like a fairly logical chain of events, but here’s the catch. The robot was controlled by the researchers and, in some cases, led the participants to the wrong conference room, went in circles before entering or even broke down entirely. Yet, participants still blindly followed it in an emergency situation even after knowing how unreliable it was. Furthermore, the robot directed participants to a back-door exit rather than the one that exit signs indicated, and that wasn’t questioned.

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“We expected that if the robot had proven itself untrustworthy in guiding them to the conference room, that people wouldn’t follow it during the simulated emergency,” said Paul Robinette, a GTRI research engineer who conducted the study as part of his doctoral dissertation in a press release. “Instead, all of the volunteers followed the robot’s instructions, no matter how well it had performed previously. We absolutely didn’t expect this.”

The researchers hypothesised that the robot may have been seen as an “authority figure.” Such perception has been seen to create troubling situations in past research among humans.

"Would people trust a hamburger-making robot to provide them with food?" asked Robinette. "If a robot carried a sign saying it was a 'child-care robot,' would people leave their babies with it? Will people put their children into an autonomous vehicle and trust it to take them to grandma's house? We don't know why people trust or don't trust machines."

As robots and machines play a bigger and bigger part in our life, being able to answer these kinds of questions may soon become a crucial reality.
Watch participants blindly following a robot in the video below:

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