Meet Nexi – Who (and what) can you trust?

Who (and what) can you trust?
Robots Have Feelings, Too

People are fidgety – they’re moving all the time. So how could the team truly zero-in on the cues that mattered? This is where Nexi comes in. Nexi is a humanoid social robot that afforded the team an important benefit – they could control all its movements perfectly. In a second experiment, the team had research participants converse with Nexi for 10 minutes, much like they did with another person in the first experiment. While conversing with the participants, Nexi — operated remotely by researchers — either expressed cues that were considered less than trustworthy or expressed similar, but non-trust-related cues. Confirming their theory, the team found that participants exposed to Nexi’s untrustworthy cues intuited that Nexi was likely to cheat them and adjusted their financial decisions accordingly. “Certain nonverbal gestures trigger emotional reactions we’re not consciously aware of, and these reactions are enormously important for understanding how interpersonal relationships develop,” said Frank. (source: EurekaAlert)

“The fact that a robot can trigger the same reactions confirms the mechanistic nature of many of the forces that influence human interaction.”