Aboutaleb Safdari

The 2023 Conference on Artificial Life, Online (2023)

doi: 10.1162/isal_a_00622

There are two types of trust: basic trust (BT) and secondary trust (ST). While ST refers to a rational mental state that is the result of individual-evidential decision making and calculation, BT is a relational state that the subjects experience. In this paper, drawing primarily on resources from the phenomenological-enactive approach to social cognition, I argue that there can be BT in the human-robot relation (HRR). This BT is the result of basic empathy for robots, that has been enriched by a long enough and complicated history of interaction with them. I propose a procedure according to which first basic empathy leads people to experience robots as pseudo-others, resulting in the formation of a thin and simple social relationship. Then, through the history of interaction between people and robots, this simple, primary empathic-based social relationship evolves into a more complicated and rich form of social relationship that fosters the BT.

 © 2023, Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license