Trust with increasing and decreasing reliability

• Published in: Human factors 2024-12, Vol.66 (12), p.2569-2589
• Main Authors: Rittenberg, Benjamin S. P., Holland, Christopher W., Barnhart, Grace E., Gaudreau, Sierra M., Neyedli, Heather F.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adult; Automation; Automation, Expert Systems; Female; Humans; Male; Man-Machine Systems; Reproducibility of Results; System reliability; Task Performance and Analysis; Trust; Young Adult
• ISSN: 0018-7208; 1547-8181; 1547-8181
• DOI: 10.1177/00187208241228636

Objective The primary purpose was to determine how trust changes over time when automation reliability increases or decreases. A secondary purpose was to determine how task-specific self-confidence is associated with trust and reliability level. Background Both overtrust and undertrust can be detrimental to system performance; therefore, the temporal dynamics of trust with changing reliability level need to be explored. Method Two experiments used a dominant-color identification task, where automation provided a recommendation to users, with the reliability of the recommendation changing over 300 trials. In Experiment 1, two groups of participants interacted with the system: one group started with a 50% reliable system which increased to 100%, while the other used a system that decreased from 100% to 50%. Experiment 2 included a group where automation reliability increased from 70% to 100%. Results Trust was initially high in the decreasing group and then declined as reliability level decreased; however, trust also declined in the 50% increasing reliability group. Furthermore, when user self-confidence increased, automation reliability had a greater influence on trust. In Experiment 2, the 70% increasing reliability group showed increased trust in the system. Conclusion Trust does not always track the reliability of automated systems; in particular, it is difficult for trust to recover once the user has interacted with a low reliability system. Applications This study provides initial evidence into the dynamics of trust for automation that gets better over time suggesting that users should only start interacting with automation when it is sufficiently reliable.