More than trust: compliance in instantaneous human-robot interactions

Compliance is when a human positively responds to a request or a recommendation given by a system. For example, when prompted, providing your thumbprint for an automated biometric scanner at the airport or starting to watch a new TV show on a streaming service ‘we think you will love’. In trust-related research, compliance is frequently used as a behavioural measure of trust. When evaluating the compliance-trust association in experimental settings, typically, the participants agree, when asked, that they complied because they trusted the system. We developed three scenarios in instantaneous settings where compliance with an instruction delivered by a robot would typically be ascribed to trust. However, rather than asking, ‘Did you trust?’, we asked, ‘Why did you comply?’ In a thematic analysis of responses, we discovered robot design characteristics and sources not related to the design that persuade humans to comply with instructions delivered by a robot.