ESCAPE with PARTNER: Experimental Suite for Cooperatively Achieved Puzzle Exercises with the Platform Assessing Risk and Trust in Nonexclusively Economic Relationships

Abstract

Trust is a socio-emotional construct used to explain why one is willing to be vulnerable to the variable and unpredicted actions of another independent actor. Virtual reality (VR) provides an excellent test platform for allowing researchers to assess trust, because it provides a safe environment yet participants can be made to feel vulnerable. In the research described in this article, we developed a VR-based game to assess trust between humans and robots in a collaborative task. This article describes the development of and first experiments with this experimental platform developed to explore humans’ trust of bots.