Trust in the Wild: How Advisors Mediate Human-Robot Relations on Dairy Farms

Trust in Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) is typically treated as an individual psychological attitude shaped by users’ perceptions of a robot’s design features. This focus on internal states and designable cues, however, obscures the social and interpretive work through which trust is accomplished in real-world human–robot interactions. Drawing on 15 hours of field observations and 18 archival interviews in Dutch dairy farms adopting robotic milking systems, we offer a practice-based perspective showing that trust “in the wild” is not produced through direct human–robot interaction but through advisors’ situated work. Advisors tune robotic systems, reassure users during uncertainty, and anchor robotic data through reference to lived contexts. These practices reveal trust as an ongoing accomplishment sustained by intermediary work.