We examined how typical trust questionnaires used in HRI were affected when participants had the option to choose "not applicable to this robot" or "not applicable to robots in general" for any given question. We found that participants do make use of these choices, particularly for questionnaires that get at social dimensions of trust. People's mental models of robots are fragile, and what was considered NA to robots in general was context-dependent. Additionally, we found no statistical difference in average score for trust questionnaires where participants had the NA options versus those that were forced to rate with a normal Likert scale. However, this does not necessarily mean that participants all interpreted the questions in the same way.
@inproceedings{chitategmark2021can,
title={Can you trust your trust measure?},
author={Meia Chita-Tegmark and Theresa Law and Nicholas Rabb and Matthias Scheutz},
year={2021},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 16th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction},
url={https://hrilab.tufts.edu/publications/chitategmark2021can.pdf}
}