The future of artificial intelligence and digital development: a study of trust in social robot capabilities

ABSTRACTThis paper aims to study people’s trust in the capabilities of social robots in the context of digital transformation. Firstly, the current application status of social robots is studied. Then, the capability trust problem of social robots is studied according to the existing problems and phenomena. Students from a municipal experimental middle school are selected for a questionnaire survey, and the anthropomorphism of social robots is taken as the independent variable. The role of social robots with different anthropomorphic degrees on students’ initial capability trust and the mediating role of attraction perception are studied. A research model is established, and SPSS 26.0 is used to further analyse the data. The results show that among the students with a low degree of an anthropomorphic social robot, the average score of anthropomorphism is 2.52, the average score of attraction perception is 3.29, and the score of capability trust is 3.64, which is the upper-middle level. There are significant differences in the initial capability trust evaluation of social robots among students of different ages (F = 38.13, P = 0.00). When the degree of anthropomorphism of social robots is at different levels, there are significant differences in students’ initial capability trust evaluation (F = 34.25, P = 0.00). It can be seen that the degree of anthropomorphism of social robots has an impact on students’ initial capability trust.KEYWORDS: Digital transformationsocial robotsdegree of anthropomorphismcapability trustattraction perception Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Data sharing agreementThe datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.Additional informationFundingThe author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.