A study of trust and competence perception in Genetic Counselling through different designs of behavior for an artificial agent

Abstract: With advancements in technology comes new opportunities to improve other disciplines. With the development of AI and Natural Language Processing methods, the opportunities for social robots to be useful equally increase. But the integration of these robots into the disciplines and daily life situations that said opportunities would demand is a process that must be performed carefully and accurately so the desired effects can be achieved. With this in mind, in this study, we aimed to explore the opportunities for social robots to become a supportive tool in the field of genetic counseling and help with the shortage of counselors worldwide. We studied the foundations and development of trust when humans interact with a social robot in this situation, while incorporating all the previous knowledge of Human-Robot Interaction into a new scenario. As an initial first contact for the research in this field, the two experiments carried out in the context of this study provided insight and revealed a trend in trust increase after interacting with the robot. A valid trust scale to assert trust in Human-Robot genetic counseling was also developed. Additionally, they provided a foundation for future expansion of similar experiments and their correct performance.