Can Robots Trust Us? Neuropsychophysiological Insights into Honesty Towards Artificial Agents

While research often examines human trust in robots, humans frequently cheat in interactions—even simple ones. This raises a neglected question: can robots trust us? Our interdisciplinary, cross-cultural research explores honesty in human-robot interaction by capturing real-time psychophysiological signals through a comparative robotics framework. We investigate whether social cues, like pupil size, that influence human-human decisions similarly impact human-robot interactions. Future work will expand this to study how human physiological and neural responses shape behavior in social dilemmas with human vs artificial partners, guiding the development of agents attuned to human signals.