Clothing the robot, building trust: personalization co-design effects in child–robot interaction

Trust is a critical component of child–robot interaction, particularly in educational and therapeutic contexts where emotional safety and sustained engagement are essential. This study investigates whether co-designing clothes for a social robot enhances children's trust and examines the mechanisms underlying this effect. Children aged 7–10 participated in clothing co-design workshops where they created clothes for the NAO robot using the needle felting technique, guided by the robot and an educator. After the workshop, each child completed an individual disclosure-related task, entrusting a secret wish to one of three identical NAO robots differing only in clothing condition: no clothing, personalized clothing, or random clothing. Trust, empathy, perceived liveliness, and negative attitudes were measured with pre-post questionnaires, showing significant improvement in trust and empathy. Behavioral observations and post-task interviews were also conducted. Most of the children selected the robot that was wearing their hand-made piece of clothing. Findings indicate that clothing co-design is associated with stronger trust indicators, with appearance personalization acting as a primary mechanism and interaction-based familiarity playing a complementary role.