Adaptation and validation of the HCTM Scale into Human-robot interaction Portuguese context: A study of measuring trust in human-robot interactions

As robots become increasingly common in a wide variety of domains, there is an increasing need to assess the trust humans have when interacting with robots. Specifically are two of the main objectives in this study: 1) to adapt and validate the Human-Computer Trust Model Scale (HCTM) to human-robot interaction (HRI), in a Portuguese population. This need is because trust in automation has been understood through its analogy to interpersonal trust. With the HCTM we intend to suggest an alternative to that. This measure of trust is a very recent scale, 2019, and based on the present context and research. More, this scale was subjected to robust statistical analysis tests and was tested at different scenarios of computing with successful. The final motive is that authors are not aware of a similar scale in the Portuguese context that can measure trust in HRI with COBOTS. The growth of this market is notable. For that, we used 243 undergraduate students with backgrounds on Management and Engineering and Industrial Management. Results, indicate a good measurement of the latent constructs, convergent reliability, internal consistency and discriminate validity. However, Dillon-Goldstein's rho measures for both Competency (0.696), Benevolence (0.686) and Reciprocity (0.604) constructs present scores close to 0.70. According to Hair et al [11] the composite reliability (internal consistency) should be higher than 0.7 (or >0.6 in exploratory research). This means that the model is acceptable, and the Portuguese version of the model satisfies the criteria for measure trust in human-robot interaction (HRI), however, have a poor internal consist.