Betraying someone and lying about it is pretty low – especially if you’re a robot . An experiment on interactions between humans and robots reveals just how easy it is for robots to regain trust after a misdeed by fibbing.

The devious robot in question is NAO, a 58-centimetre-high humanoid that moves and interacts with people. Sarah Sebo at Yale University and colleagues arranged for 82 people to compete for points against NAO in an asteroid-shooting computer game.

In some rounds, a special asteroid blaster was awarded to either the human …