Measuring trust in human robot interactions: Development of the “trust perception scale-HRI”

Abstract

As robots penetrate further into the everyday environments, trust in these robots becomes a crucial issue. The purpose of this work was to create and validate a reliable scale that could measure changes in an individual’s trust in a robot. Assessment of current trust theory identified measurable antecedents specific to the human, the robot, and the environment. Six experiments subsumed the development of the 40 item trust scale. Scale development included the creation of a 156 item pool. Two experiments identified the robot features and perceived functional characteristics that were related to the classification of a machine as a robot for this item pool. Item pool reduction techniques and subject matter expert (SME) content validation were used to reduce the scale to 42 items. The two final experiments were then conducted to validate the scale. The finalized 40 item pre-post interaction trust scale was designed to measure trust perceptions specific to human-robot interaction. The scale measures trust on a 0–100 % rating scale and provides a percentage trust score. A 14 item sub-scale of this final version of the test recommended by SMEs may be sufficient for some HRI tasks, and the implications of this proposition are discussed.