Technology Network

      With the help of psychologists, economists, and robotics an range of institutions are to program an Robot which will mimic the nonverbal gestures and tics that humans use to signal their trustworthiness. Yes, an Robot named as Nexi is cracking the code of why humans trust.

Northeastern psychology professor David DeSteno explains why this is crucial:
      "People tend to mimic each others body language, which might help them develop intuitions about what other people are feeling — intuitions about whether they'll treat them fairly."

      While researchers believe that it's down to subtle non-verbal cues that we pick up on as we interact with people, and has created a wide-eyed robot to try and find out exactly which gestures help us decide whether a person is trustworthy or not.

      In other words, our tendency to imitate the gestures & nonverbal cues of others gives us insight into their motivations and intentions. It's then a question of translating this information into an intuitive hunch as to whether the person we're talking to is as trustworthy as they say they are. If that's true, there should be specific gestures Nexi can do that will either maximize or minimize people's assessment of its trustworthiness.

      The Testing with Nexi is done using an economic game known as "Give Some", the humans have to decide how to share the sum of money equally between them and Nexi, as well as how they would get if an distribution is done by Nexi .

      These is how help researches to continue their work by testing whether Nexi can assess the trustworthiness of its human conversation partners.