Toward Quantifying Trust Dynamics: How People Adjust Their Trust After Moment-to-Moment Interaction With Automation

OBJECTIVE: We examine how human operators adjust their trust in automation as a result of their moment-to-moment interaction with automation. BACKGROUND: Most existing studies measured trust by administering questionnaires at the end of an experiment. Only a limited number of studies viewed trust as a dynamic variable that can strengthen or decay over time. METHOD: Seventy-five participants took part in an aided memory recognition task. In the task, participants viewed a series of images and later on performed 40 trials of the recognition task to identify a target image when it was presented with a distractor. In each trial, participants performed the initial recognition by themselves, received a recommendation from an automated decision aid, and performed the final recognition. After each trial, participants reported their trust on a visual analog scale. RESULTS: Outcome bias and contrast effect significantly influence human operators’ trust adjustments. An automation failure leads to a larger trust decrement if the final outcome is undesirable, and a marginally larger trust decrement if the human operator succeeds the task by him/herself. An automation success engenders a greater trust increment if the human operator fails the task. Additionally, automation failures have a larger effect on trust adjustment than automation successes. CONCLUSION: Human operators adjust their trust in automation as a result of their moment-to-moment interaction with automation. Their trust adjustments are significantly influenced by decision-making heuristics/biases. APPLICATION: Understanding the trust adjustment process enables accurate prediction of the operators’ moment-to-moment trust in automation and informs the design of trust-aware adaptive automation.