Trust Calibration Through Intentional Errors: Designing Robot Errors to Decrease Children’s Trust Towards Robots

Robots are being developed to help in various settings with young children. However, research suggests that children may overtrust robots, which can have a negative impact when such trust is unwanted or unsafe. Based on recent results from the community we suggest designing robots to use intentional errors to potentially reduce children’s trust in robots and to mitigate overtrust. We present a breakdown of robot errors that might affect children’s trust towards robots, and which could be used intentionally to mitigate overtrust. This includes accuracy errors, responsiveness errors, and error recovery strategies. We highlight how they could be used to decrease trust. We lastly provide an agenda for researchers to further investigate how the intentional use of robot errors could help to mitigate children’s overtrust in robots.