Toward Study on the Effects of Robot's Humorous Apology on Human's Trust Recovery
Authors: Gayoung Kim, Go-Eum Cha, Wonse Jo
Organizations: A+HRI Laboratory, Department of Information and Telecommunication Engineering, Incheon National University, Incheon, South Korea. · Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, IN, USA.
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.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Conceptual overview of the hypothesized interaction between apology strategy and error severity on trust recovery. This figure was generated by ChatGPT and Google Gemini (image generation feature)
Fig. 2: Main screen of the warehouse simulator [ 7 ] .
Department of Computer Science, Cornell University · Toyota Research Institute (TRI). · Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University
School of Social Sciences, Laurentian University, Sudbury, ON, P3E 2C6 · School of Engineering and Computer Science, Laurentian University, Sudbury, ON, P3E 2C6