What Are We Measuring? Bonding, Trust, and the Evaluation of Human-Robot Relationships

Abstract

In human-robot interaction, relationship quality is often quantified using self-report measures, particularly related to "trust", such that a robot's trustworthiness comes to serve as an index of how close or "bonded" a human feels to it. I argue that this is a category error: trust and social bonding are distinct constructs, differing in their antecedents, their timescales, their bodily signatures, the human experience they produce, the robot responses they call for, and the ethical concerns they raise. I propose that we view them as independent dimensions, and describe the resulting two-dimensional space of possible relationship states under this view, with four configurations: avoidance, functional, dependence, and symbiosis. I then draw out some consequences for human-state-aware robotics: (1) social bonding is an explicit estimation target distinct from trust, (2) it should condition online adaptation (3) it reframes what a "failure" means, and (4) it raises the possibility of identifying dysfunctional relationships, in which a user remains attached to a robot that no longer merits reliance. This is ongoing work, offered in part to prompt the field to reconsider what it means to evaluate relationship quality in human-robot dyads.