If a robot has enough human characteristics people will lie to it to save hurting its feelings, a study has shown.

The study, which explored how robots can gain a human's trust even when they make mistakes, pitted an efficient but inexpressive robot against an error prone, emotional one and monitored how its colleagues treated it.

The researchers found that people are more likely to forgive a personable robot's mistakes, and will even go so far as lying to the robot to prevent its feelings from being hurt.