Can Robots Say Sorry and Fix Trust?
Repairing Trust in Robots?: A Meta-analysis of HRI Trust Repair Studies with a No-Repair Condition
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a healthcare professional. Terms
Surprising Findings
Even the best trust repair strategies only have a small effect on restoring trust.
Common sense suggests saying sorry and explaining should significantly fix broken trust, especially in human-like interactions—but here, the impact is minimal.
Practical Takeaways
Design robots to apologize and explain errors clearly when they occur.
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a healthcare professional. Terms
Surprising Findings
Even the best trust repair strategies only have a small effect on restoring trust.
Common sense suggests saying sorry and explaining should significantly fix broken trust, especially in human-like interactions—but here, the impact is minimal.
Practical Takeaways
Design robots to apologize and explain errors clearly when they occur.
Publication
Journal
2025 20th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)
Year
2025
Authors
Connor Esterwood, L. Robert
Related Content
Claims (4)
Putting together lots of small studies gives a better guess about what's really going on in the whole population than looking at just one small study.
Even the best ways we have to fix trust between people and robots don't work very well — trust doesn't fully come back after it's broken.
When robots mess up, saying sorry or explaining what went wrong works better than other fixes to get people to trust them again — but it still doesn’t work perfectly.
When robots mess up, saying sorry and explaining what went wrong helps people trust them again better than other ways—being honest and owning the mistake really matters.