Addressing Trust and Negative Attitudes Toward Robots in Human-Robot Collaborative Scenarios: Insights from the Industrial Work Setting

Recent advancements in Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) have brought to light the significance of ethical, psychological, and attitudinal factors in advanced work and industrial settings, whereby collaborative robots assist humans in work tasks. In these environments, individual factors, attitudes, and trust beliefs of human workers towards robots have a direct impact on the perceived efficiency and safety of HRCs, contributing to worker well-being in the workplace. However, most of the existing research on these topics has been concentrated on social robots and much less on industrial ones. This study aims to fill this gap by exploring the relationships between Negative Attitudes toward robots (NARS) and Trust in industrial HRC. Results demonstrated how, while the overall correlation between NARS and Trust was non-significant, unexpected trends also arose. Gender-dependent dynamics added complexity, with women exhibiting stronger correlations between emotional attitudes and trust. Men, on the other hand, demonstrated a link between stronger NARS and enhanced trust, particularly in robot motion speed perceptions. These intricate findings emphasize the need for tailored design considerations in cobot development, acknowledging the nuanced interplay between dispositional attitudes and trust in shaping human perceptions of robotic technologies in practical scenarios.