Trust building with artificial intelligence: comparing with human in investment behaviour, emotional arousal and neuro activities

This study investigated on people's two-stage iterative trust building process (the initial trust stage and the iteration from feedback stage) with AI partners, and made comparisons with human partners in the aspects of investment behavior, emotional arousal and neuro activities. The experiment was designed using repeated trust games and the investment amount was transformed into the initial trust, the feedback from the partner and the final trust. Comparisons of behavior were conducted by regression analysis. The results showed that the initial trust for AI had stronger influence on the final trust than human partners, while the feedback from human during interaction had stronger influence than the feedback from AI. By emotion scales, it was found that the arousal of participants' positive emotions was more significant when interacting with human than with AI, and the emotional arousal (both positive and negative ones) had stronger correlation with the feedback from human than from AI.. The findings indicated a stronger influence of feedback from human partners on decision making and emotional arousal than from AI partners. The fNIRS results also showed that people's neuro activities in the PFC were stronger when making investment decisions towards human than AI partners.