Personal Influences on Dynamic Trust Formation in Human-Agent Interaction

The development of automated technologies in our daily life has transformed the role of human operators from a controller to a teammate who shares control with automated agents. However, this 'teammate' relationship between humans and automation raises an important but challenging research question regarding the formation of human-agent trust. Considering that the formation of human-agent trust is a dynamic and sophisticated process involving human factors, this study conducted a two-phase online experiment to examine personal influences on users' trust propensity and their trust formation in human-agent interactions. Our findings revealed distinctive personal influences on dispositional trust and the formation of human-agent trust at different stages. We found that users who exhibit higher trust propensities in humans also develop higher trust toward automated agents in initial stages. This study, as the first of its kind, not only fills the gap of knowledge about personal influences on human-agent trust, but also offers opportunities to enhance the future design of automated agent systems.