Robot appearance showed no meaningful effect on trust: pairwise robot differences did not reach significance after Bonferroni adjustment¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r2 · q3
Currency · newest study 2026 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q3 i? Pairwise comparisons between the three robots revealed no statistically significant differences in trust after Bonferroni adjustment; equivalence was not tested. → Anna-Maria Velentza 2026

Evidence¶

Anna-Maria Velentza 2026¶

Anna-Maria Velentza, Konstantina Nikou, Anne-Gwenn Bosser, Nikolaos Fachantidis. (2026). What Robots Do Matters More Than What They Look Like: Task Context Shapes Trust in Educational HRI. https://www.google.com/search?q=%22What+Robots+Do+Matters+More+Than+What+They+Look+Like%22 doi:10.1109/ro-man72286.2026.11714558

q3 · i? · causal · r2

Bonferroni-adjusted post hoc robot comparisons in the N = 81 repeated-measures experiment; estimated marginal means were R1: M = 3.17, R2: M = 3.17, R3: M = 3.10. The article concludes "the type of robot did not meaningfully influence participants' trust". No effect size is printed for these comparisons.

"Pairwise comparisons between robots revealed no statistically significant differences in trust. Differences between R1–R2 (p<.05), R1–R3 (p = .069), and R2–R3 (p = .062) did not reach significance after Bonferroni adjustment."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• The interaction between robot appearance and task on trust was only marginal, suggesting appearance may slightly modulate expectations without determining trust — related
• Task type strongly determines trust in educational robots, with highest trust for procedural instruction, moderate trust for teaching, and lowest trust when robots request personal information — related
• Trust evaluations were strongly and positively correlated across all robot–task combinations, suggesting trust in social robots may be a stable, generalized attitude — related
• Instructional approaches do not differ significantly in monitoring or reflecting, and omnibus differences in orienting and planning show no significant pairwise differences — related
• Hypotheses that specific robot appearances would be trusted more in matching tasks (humanoids for teaching, task-oriented robots for instructions, soft robots for personal disclosure) were not confirmed — possibly the same claim (merge candidate)