Abstract:Human trust research uncovered important catalysts for trust building between interaction partners such as appearance or cognitive factors. The introduction of robots into social interactions calls for a reevaluation of these findings and also brings new challenges and opportunities. In this paper, we suggest approaching trust research in a circular way by drawing from human trust findings, validating them and conceptualizing them for robots, and finally using the precise manipulability of robots to explore previously less-explored areas of trust formation to generate new hypotheses for trust building between agents.