DESCRIPTION :
The internship focuses on trust in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) (Hancock et al., 2011; 2021), examining how trust is built, maintained, deteriorated, or repaired. Trust deterioration can result from technical failures and/or violations of social norms (Tian & Oviatt, 2021; Honig & Oron-Gilad, 2018), while trust repair can be achieved through robot recovery strategies (Honig & Oron-Gilad, 2018; Tian & Oviatt, 2021) among which justifications (Phillips & Malle, 2025). The research investigates these dynamics in relation to participants' expectations regarding the robot behavior across two key dimensions of the robot behavior: performance and ethics (Ullman & Malle, 2021).
Research Context:
The study will be conducted through laboratory experiments and real-world settings: reception areas, cafeterias, offices, corridors, and other naturalistic environments. Research will utilize classical trust paradigms and measurements including: (i) attitutional measures pre- and post-task evaluations (qualitative and quantitative assessments) (e.g. (MDMT scale); (ii) behavioral measures: reaction times, behavioral changes, engagement patterns (Campagna, & Rehm2025). and (iii) video analysis (Gaultier et al., 2015).
The internship is for a 4 to 6 months period and must terminate before mid-July.
The candidate will collaborate with Serena Ivaldi (researcher) and Elisabetta Zibetti (researcher).
REFERENCES
Campagna, G., & Rehm, M. (2025). A Systematic Review of Trust Assessments in Human-Robot Interaction. ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, 14(2), 1-35.
Gaultier, M., Mirmil, B., Stollberger, G., Stadler, S., Buchner, R., & Tscheligi, M. (2015). Systematic analysis of video data from different human-robot interaction studies: a categorization of social signals during error situations. Frontiers in psychology, 6, 931.
Hancock, P. A., Billings, D. R., Schaefer, K. E., Chen, J. Y., De Visser, E. J., & Parasuraman, R. (2011). A meta-analysis of factors affecting trust in human-robot interaction. Human Factors, 53(5), 517-527.
Hancock, P. A., Kessler, T. T., Kaplan, A. D., Brill, J. C., & Szalma, J. L. (2021). Evolving trust in robots: Specification through sequential and comparative meta-analyses. Human Factors, 63(7), 1196-1229.
Honig, S., & Oron-Gilad, T. (2018). Understanding and resolving failures in human-robot interaction: Tying dialogue to cognition. Journal of Human-Robot Interaction, 7(2).
Lawrence, S., Jouaiti, M., Hoey, J., Nahariv, C. L., & Dautenhahn, K. (2025). The Role of Social Norms in Human-Robot Interaction: A Systematic Review. ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, 14(3), 1-21.
Liu, D., Li, C., Zhang, J., & Huang, W. (2023). Robot service failure and recovery: Literature review and future directions. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 20(4), 17298806231191606.
MDMT scale : https://research.clps.brown.edu/SocCogSci/Measures/
Malle, B. F., & Ullman, D. (2021). A multidimensional conception and measure of human-robot trust. In Trust in human-robot interaction (pp. 3-25). Academic Press.
Phillips, E. K., & Malle, B. F. (2025). The power of justifications to repair human-robot trust, even under moral disagreement. Scientific Reports, 15(1), 34706.
Tian, L., & Oviatt, S. (2021). A taxonomy of social errors in human-robot interaction. ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI), 10(2), 1-32.
Principales activités
* Review state of the art in trust in HRI
* Participate to the design of experimental protocols to study trust dynamics
* Carry out experiments
* Analyze results
* Write report
* Collaborate with the team on the current experiments and developments
* Participate to the team and the project's relevant activities and events