Robots started their journey in books and movies; nowadays, they are becoming an
important part of our daily lives: from industrial robots, passing through entertainment
robots, and reaching social robotics in fields like healthcare or education.
An important aspect of social robotics is the human counterpart, therefore, there is
an interaction between the humans and robots. Interactions among humans are often
taken for granted as, since children, we learn how to interact with each other. In robotics,
this interaction is still very immature, however, critical for a successful incorporation of
robots in society. Human robot interaction (HRI) is the domain that works on improving
these interactions.
HRI encloses many aspects, and a significant one is trust. Trust is the assumption that
somebody or something is good and reliable; and it is critical for a developed society.
Therefore, in a society where robots can part, the trust they could generate will be essential
for cohabitation.
A downside of trust is overtrusting an entity; in other words, an insufficient alignment
of the projected trust and the expectations of a morally correct behaviour. This effect
could negatively influence and damage the interactions between agents. In the case of
humans, it is usually exploited by scammers, conmen or social engineers - who take
advantage of the people's overtrust in order to manipulate them into performing actions
that may not be beneficial for the victims.
This thesis tries to shed light on the development of trust towards robots, how this
trust could become overtrust and be exploited by social engineering techniques. More
precisely, the following experiments have been carried out: (i) Treasure Hunt, in which
the robot followed a social engineering framework where it gathered personal
information from the participants, improved the trust and rapport with them, and at the
end, it exploited that trust manipulating participants into performing a risky action.
(ii) Wicked Professor, in which a very human-like robot tried to enforce its authority to
make participants obey socially inappropriate requests. Most of the participants realized
that the requests were morally wrong, but eventually, they succumbed to the robot'sauthority while holding the robot as morally responsible. (iii) Detective iCub, in which it
was evaluated whether the robot could be endowed with the ability to detect when the
human partner was lying. Deception detection is an essential skill for social engineers and
professionals in the domain of education, healthcare and security. The robot achieved
75% of accuracy in the lie detection. There were also found slight differences in the
behaviour exhibited by the participants when interacting with a human or a robot
interrogator.
Lastly, this thesis approaches the topic of privacy - a fundamental human value. With
the integration of robotics and technology in our society, privacy will be affected in ways
we are not used. Robots have sensors able to record and gather all kind of data, and it is
possible that this information is transmitted via internet without the knowledge of the
user. This is an important aspect to consider since a violation in privacy can heavily
impact the trust.
Summarizing, this thesis shows that robots are able to establish and improve trust
during an interaction, to take advantage of overtrust and to misuse it by applying different
types of social engineering techniques, such as manipulation and authority. Moreover,
robots can be enabled to pick up different human cues to detect deception, which can
help both, social engineers and professionals in the human sector. Nevertheless, it is of
the utmost importance to make roboticists, programmers, entrepreneurs, lawyers,
psychologists, and other sectors involved, aware that social robots can be highly beneficial
for humans, but they could also be exploited for malicious purposes
