More Than Trust: Compliance in Instantaneous Human-robot Interactions

Compliance is when a human positivelyresponds to a request or a recommendation given by a system.For example, when prompted, providing your thumbprint foran automated biometric scanner at the airport or starting towatch a new TV show on a streaming service ‘we think youwill love’. In trust-related research, compliance is frequentlyused as a behavioural measure of trust. When evaluating thecompliance-trust association in experimental settings, typically,the participants agree, when asked, that they complied becausethey trusted the system. We developed three scenarios ininstantaneous settings where compliance with an instructiondelivered by a robot would typically be ascribed to trust.However, rather than asking, ‘Did you trust?’, we asked, ‘Whydid you comply?’ In a thematic analysis of responses, wediscovered robot design characteristics and sources not relatedto the design that persuade humans to comply with instructionsdelivered by a robot.