Do as I Say, Not as I Do: People Still Fall for Deception Even after Being Fooled and Protecting Others

Digital technologies make it easy for people to be misled by messages and social robots, raising the question of how to help users become less easily deceived. We examined whether people become more cautious and feel that they are contributing more to others if, after being deceived by a robot, they use the same robot to protect another person from deception. In our experiment, adults were first deceived by a communication robot in a consent-form scenario, then briefly operated it to guide a dummy participant away from deception, and finally completed a similar online consent-form check without the robot. The results showed that most were deceived again in the online task, and their perceived contribution to others did not significantly increase. These findings suggest that a single brief chance to protect others is insufficient to reliably increase caution, but the paradigm offers a basis for studying how robots might support resistance to deception.