It Is the Way You Lie: Effects of Social Robot Deceptions on Trust in an Assistive Robot

Persuasion is defined as the process of changing people’s attitudes and behaviours and social assistive robots are used to favour such changes through a variety of mechanisms. While human-robot deception is considered to present philosophical and psychological issues, it still may have positive consequences. In particular, prosocial deception can be beneficial and have positive influences, such as increasing trust. This work presents an exploration of robot deception and its effects on people’s changes in behaviour and trust in a social assistive robot. In particular, we explore the effects of different types of deception states (superficial, external, and hidden states) on people’s compliance with a social robot during an assistive game scenario. We collected the responses of 63 participants to evaluate their perception of trust in the robot, and their perception of the robot’s deceiving behaviours. Our results showed that the deceiving behaviours of the robot affected people’s trust and that superficial state deception has higher negative effects on people’s perception of the robot and trust in it compared to the other two deceptive states.