Building trust beyond algorithm: How effort, service speed, and novelty increase trust in robot services

초록

Trust can influence consumers' adoption of, and responses to, technology in a service environment. When humans communicate with non-human agents such as service robots, they may consider both human-like qualities and machine-like efficiency. As factors fostering trust, this research proposes effort perception and service speed. Intrinsic human qualities, such as perceived effort, can also be attributed to robots. Simultaneously, robots can be expected to possess the machine-oriented attribute of service speed. Based on relational dialectics theory, these two attributes of effort and speed, which are expected of service providers, can be treated as potentially contradictory to one another. This contradiction possibility arises because effortful service typically requires more time, whereas mechanical efficiency demands less. However, as service robots are machines with human-like features, it is also probable that the dialectical tension between effort and speed can be resolved, and both effort and speed can be important factors leading to trust. This research showed videos of robots serving coffee to participants, who subsequently indicated their perceptions of robot service. Findings, replicated across three studies, show that effort is perceived through anthropomorphism and AI integration, both of which enhance trust. Furthermore, participants perceive effort and service speed in balance, resulting in greater trust, which in turn leads to increased willingness to pay for robot services. These findings may imply that individuals are likely to minimize dialectical tension, seeking a middle ground where robots maintain mechanical performance while also exhibiting human-like qualities. Other findings and implications thereof are further discussed in the paper.

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