Robot Broken Promise? Repair strategies for mitigating loss of trust for repeated failures

Trust repair strategies are an important part of human-robot interaction. In this study, we investigate how repeated failures impact users’ trust and how we might mitigate them. Specifically, we look at different repair strategies in the form of apologies, with additional features to them such as warnings and promises. Through an online study, we explore these repair strategies for repeated failures in the form of robot incongruence, where there is a mismatch of verbal and non-verbal information given by the robot. Our results show that such incongruent robot behaviour has a significant overall negative impact on participants’ trust. We found that the robot making a promise, and then breaking it, results in a significant decrease in participants’ trust, when compared to a general apology as a repair strategy. These findings contribute to the research on trust repair strategies and, additionally, shed light on how robot failures, in the form of incongruences, impact participants’ trust.