Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

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

A Vignette-Based Study

  • Published:
International Journal of Social Robotics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

As 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.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Ashraf N, Bohnet I, Piankov N (2006) Decomposing trust and trustworthiness. Exp Econ 9(3):193–208

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Behrens SI, Egsvang AKK, Hansen M, Møllegård-Schroll AM (2018) Gendered robot voices and their influence on trust. In: Companion of the 2018 ACM/IEEE international conference on human–robot interaction. ACM, pp 63–64

  3. Ben-Ner A, Halldorsson F (2010) Trusting and trustworthiness: What are they, how to measure them, and what affects them. J Econ Psychol 31(1):64–79

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Bernotat J, Eyssel F, Sachse J (2019) The (fe) male robot: how robot body shape impacts first impressions and trust towards robots. Int J Soc Robot 11:1–13

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Buchan NR, Croson RTA, Solnick S (2008) Trust and gender: an examination of behavior and beliefs in the investment game. J Econ Behav Organ 68(3–4):466–476

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Caruso DR, Salovey P (2004) The emotionally intelligent manager: how to develop and use the four key emotional skills of leadership. Wiley, New York

    Google Scholar 

  7. Chita-Tegmark M, Lohani M, Scheutz M (2019) Gender effects in perceptions of robots and humans with varying emotional intelligence. In: 2019 14th ACM/IEEE international conference on human–robot interaction (HRI). IEEE, pp 230–238

  8. Clarke N (2010) Emotional intelligence and its relationship to transformational leadership and key project manager competences. Project Manag J 41(2):5–20

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Croson R, Gneezy U (2009) Gender differences in preferences. J Econ Lit 47(2):448–74

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Crowelly CR, Villanoy M, Scheutzz M, Schermerhornz P (2009) Gendered voice and robot entities: perceptions and reactions of male and female subjects. In: 2009 IEEE/RSJ international conference on intelligent robots and systems. IEEE, pp 3735–3741

  11. DeSteno D, Breazeal C, Frank RH, Pizarro D, Baumann J, Dickens L, Lee JJ (2012) Detecting the trustworthiness of novel partners in economic exchange. Psychol Sci 23(12):1549–1556

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Else-Quest NM, Hyde JS, Goldsmith HH, Van Hulle CA (2006) Gender differences in temperament: a meta-analysis. Psychol Bull 132(1):33

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Fan L, Scheutz M, Lohani M, McCoy M, Stokes C (2017) Do we need emotionally intelligent artificial agents? First results of human perceptions of emotional intelligence in humans compared to robots. In: International conference on intelligent virtual agents. Springer, pp 129–141

  14. Fariselli L, Freedman J, Ghini M, Valentini F (2008) Stress, emotional intelligence, and performance in healthcare. Retrieved 2 Dec 2009

  15. Feingold A (1994) Gender differences in personality: a meta-analysis. Psychol Bull 116(3):429

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Ghazali AS, Ham J, Barakova EI, Markopoulos P (2018) Effects of robot facial characteristics and gender in persuasive human–robot interaction. Front Robot AI 5:73

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Hancock PA, Billings DR, Schaefer KE, Chen JYC, De Visser EJ, Parasuraman R (2011) A meta-analysis of factors affecting trust in human–robot interaction. Human Factors 53(5):517–527

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Heerink M (2011) Exploring the influence of age, gender, education and computer experience on robot acceptance by older adults. In: Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Human–robot interaction. ACM, pp 147–148

  19. Kim S, Goh J, Jun S (2018) The use of voice input to induce human communication with banking chatbots. In: Companion of the 2018 ACM/IEEE international conference on human-robot interaction. ACM, pp 151–152

  20. Kokkinos CM, Kipritsi E (2012) The relationship between bullying, victimization, trait emotional intelligence, self-efficacy and empathy among preadolescents. Soc Psychol Educ 15(1):41–58

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Kraus M, Kraus J, Baumann M, Minker W (2018) Effects of gender stereotypes on trust and likability in spoken human–robot interaction. In: Proceedings of the eleventh international conference on language resources and evaluation (LREC-2018)

  22. Law T, Sheutz M Trust: Recent concepts and evaluations in human–robot interaction, chapter 2. In: Nam C, Lyons J (eds) Trust in human–robot interaction: research and application. Elsevier, San Diego (In Review)

  23. Lazányi K, Hajdu B (2017) Trust in human–robot interactions. In: 2017 IEEE 14th international scientific conference on informatics. IEEE, pp 216–220

  24. Lopez-Zafra E, Gartzia L (2014) Perceptions of gender differences in self-report measures of emotional intelligence. Sex Roles 70(11–12):479–495

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Mayer RC, Davis JH (1999) The effect of the performance appraisal system on trust for management: a field quasi-experiment. J Appl Psychol 84(1):123

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. McClure EB (2000) A meta-analytic review of sex differences in facial expression processing and their development in infants, children, and adolescents. Psychol Bull 126(3):424

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  27. Momeni N (2009) The relation between managers’ emotional intelligence and the organizational climate they create. Public Pers Manag 38(2):35–48

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Nass CI, Brave S (2005) Wired for speech: how voice activates and advances the human-computer relationship. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

    Google Scholar 

  29. Orbell J, Dawes R, Schwartz-Shea P (1994) Trust, social categories, and individuals: the case of gender. Motiv Emotion 18(2):109–128

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Petrides KV, Furnham A, Martin GN (2004) Estimates of emotional and psychometric intelligence: evidence for gender-based stereotypes. J Soc Psychol 144(2):149–162

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Powers A, Kramer ADI, Lim S, Kuo J, Lee S, Kiesler S (2005) Eliciting information from people with a gendered humanoid robot. In: IEEE international workshop on robot and human interactive communication, ROMAN 2005. IEEE, pp 158–163

  32. Rossi A, Garcia F, Maya AC, Dautenhahn K, Koay KL, Walters ML, Pandey AK (2019) Investigating the effects of social interactive behaviours of a robot on people’s trust during a navigation task. In: Annual conference towards autonomous robotic systems. Springer, pp 349–361

  33. Rueckert L, Naybar N (2008) Gender differences in empathy: the role of the right hemisphere. Brain Cogn 67(2):162–167

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. Salovey P, Mayer JD (1990) Emotional intelligence. Imagin Cogn Personal 9(3):185–211

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Schermerhorn P, Scheutz M, Crowell CR (2008) Robot social presence and gender: Do females view robots differently than males? In: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE international conference on Human robot interaction. ACM, pp 263–270

  36. Schilbach L, Timmermans B, Reddy V, Costall A, Bente G, Schlicht T, Vogeley K (2013) Toward a second-person neuroscience 1. Behav Brain Sci 36(4):393–414

    Article  Google Scholar 

  37. Schroeder J, Epley N (2016) Mistaking minds and machines: how speech affects dehumanization and anthropomorphism. J Exp Psychol Gen 145(11):1427

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. Schulte-Rüther M, Markowitsch HJ, Shah NJ, Fink GR, Piefke M (2008) Gender differences in brain networks supporting empathy. Neuroimage 42(1):393–403

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. Schutte NS, Malouff JM, Hall LE, Haggerty DJ, Cooper JT, Golden CJ, Dornheim L (1998) Development and validation of a measure of emotional intelligence. Personal Individ Diff 25(2):167–177

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Siegel M, Breazeal C, Norton MI (2009) Persuasive robotics: the influence of robot gender on human behavior. In: 2009 IEEE/RSJ international conference on intelligent robots and systems. IEEE, pp 2563–2568

  41. Tay B, Jung Y, Park T (2014) When stereotypes meet robots: the double-edge sword of robot gender and personality in human–robot interaction. Comput Human Behav 38:75–84

    Article  Google Scholar 

  42. Toussaint L, Webb JR (2005) Gender differences in the relationship between empathy and forgiveness. J Soc Psychol 145(6):673–685

    Article  Google Scholar 

  43. Tung VWS, Au N (2018) Exploring customer experiences with robotics in hospitality. Int J Contemp Hosp Manag 30(7):2680–2697

    Article  Google Scholar 

  44. Ullman D, Malle BF (2018) What does it mean to trust a robot?: steps toward a multidimensional measure of trust. In: Companion of the 2018 ACM/IEEE international conference on human–robot interaction. ACM, pp 263–264

  45. Xu K (2019) First encounter with robot alpha: how individual differences interact with vocal and kinetic cues in users’ social responses. New Media & Society, page 1461444819851479

  46. Yamagishi T (1998) The structure of trust: the evolutionary games of mind and society. University of Tokyo Press, Tokyo

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Funding

This project was funded in part by the National Science Foundation Grant IIS-1316809 and the AFOSR Grant FA9550-18-1-0465.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. HRI Lab, Tufts University, Medford, MA, 02155, USA

    Theresa Law, Meia Chita-Tegmark & Matthias Scheutz

Authors
  1. Theresa Law
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Meia Chita-Tegmark
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Matthias Scheutz
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Theresa Law.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Law, T., Chita-Tegmark, M. & Scheutz, M. The Interplay Between Emotional Intelligence, Trust, and Gender in Human–Robot Interaction. Int J of Soc Robotics 13, 297–309 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-020-00624-1

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-020-00624-1

Keywords

Search

Navigation