Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

What is the relationship between trust and perceived agency? The present study experimentally investigated the effect of people’s perception of a robot’s compliance (and resistance) to social norms on their evaluation of a robot’s perceived agency, performance trust, and moral trust. Participants reported a norm-conforming robot to have higher perceived agency and a greater sense of trust than a robot that violated social norms. We also found that perceived agency, regardless of how much a robot followed norms, was correlated with trust. We interpret this finding as evidence that as people see a robot as having agency, they trust it more.