By Kalwinder KaurSep 13 2012
Northeastern University psychology professor David DeSteno and his co-workers Robert Frank and David Pizarro from Cornell University and Cynthia Breazeal from MIT's Media Lab have found out the competence of non-verbal cues to estimate a person's and a robot's reliability, based on a robot called Nexi. The findings appeared in the journal Psychological Science.
Nonverbal cues can analyze and determine a person's likely actions when there is no reliable information on that person's reputation. DeSteno and his team gathered data from face-to-face conversations with the individuals under study and understood that sets of cues determine a person's trustworthiness, rather than a single non-verbal movement. The expression of cues by participants to their partners was not reliable however.
Nexi is a humanoid social robot that enabled the research team to have perfect control over all its movements. The second experiment involved a 10 minute conversation between the research participants and Nexi. Maneuvered by researchers, Nexi conversed with the participants and was able to express cues that were less than trustworthy or equivalent, but non-trust-related cues. The team determined that participants posed with Nexi's untrustworthy cues had a perception that Nexi was liable to cheat them and therefore altered their financial decisions.
This discovery has enabled the research team to answer questions related to evaluating an unknown person’s reliability. It also represents the human mind's readiness to put forth trust-related intentions to technological units using same movements. These findings will help promote security and financial activities and can be used in designing robots and computer-based agents.
Source: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/
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