Melissa Dahl writes: The fire alarm goes off, and it’s apparently not a mistake or a drill: Just outside the door, smoke fills the hallway. Luckily, you happen to have a guide for such a situation: a little bot with a sign that literally reads EMERGENCY GUIDE ROBOT. But, wait — it’s taking you in the opposite direction of the way you came in, and it seems to be wanting you to go down an unfamiliar hallway. Do you trust your own instinct and escape the way you came? Or do you trust the robot?

Probably, you will blindly follow the robot, according to the findings of a fascinating new study from the Georgia Institute of Technology. In an emergency situation — a fake one, though the test subjects didn’t know that — most people trusted the robot over their own instincts, even when the robot had showed earlier signs of malfunctioning. It’s a new wrinkle for researchers who study trust in human-robot interactions. Previously, this work had been focused on getting people to trust robotics, such as Google’s driverless cars. Now this new research hints at another problem: How do you stop people from trusting robots too much? It’s a timely question, especially considering the news this week of the first crash caused by one of Google’s self-driving cars. [Continue reading…]