The Interplay Between Emotional Intelligence, Trust, and Gender in Human–Robot Interaction

robots begin to enter roles in which they work closely with human teammates or peers, it is critical to understand how people trust them based on how they interpret the robot’s behavior. In this paper we investigated the interplay between trust in a robot and people’s perceptions of the robot’s emotional intelligence. We used a vignette-based method to explore the following questions: (1) Do subjects perceive differences in robot EI, and is their trust in the robot influenced by differences in the robot’s reliability and capability? (2) Does a robot’s EI influence how much it is trusted and conversely does a robot’s capability and reliability influence how emotionally intelligent it is perceived to be? (3) Do people trust male and female robots differently when the robots exhibit different levels of EI or different levels of capability and reliability, and do gender stereotypical expectations related to EI transfer to trust?; (4) Does focusing on the robot’s EI increase one’s trust in the robot? (5) Is the interplay between trust, EI and gender the same for different levels of evoked social presence and human-likeness (i.e., when the interaction is presented in different modalities, text or spoken dialogue when the robot’s voice is actually heard)? We found that trust in the robot was influenced by the level of the robot’s EI ( p < .001) and that gender stereotypical expectations related to EI were transferred to trust ( p = .006), but gender effects on trust disappeared when only capability and reliability (robot’s trustworthiness) were manipulated but not the robot’s EI ( p = .103). Surprisingly, we found that people trusted the robot more when the interaction was presented in text format ( p = .024), going against our hypothesis that spoken dialogue would evoke more social presence and thus bolster EI perception and instill more trust. We suggest that this effect might be due to people’s expectations of a more expressive and human-like voice. Finally, we also found that people’s trust ratings in the robot were higher when they were made to notice and think about the robot’s EI, by answering EI questionnaires prior to trust questionnaires ( p = .022). We discuss the implications of our findings for robot design and HRI research.