Human vs. Automation: Which One Will You Trust More If You Are About to Lose Money?

In the context of teamwork, prior efforts noted that trust degradation due to failures is slower in the case of human partners compared to automated agents. In our work, we wanted to investigate whether this holds true when the cost of mistakes (i.e., risk) is high. Toward that, we designed a 2 (partner: automation/human) × 2 (risk: low/high) × 2 (reliability: low/high) between-group study where participants completed five rounds of a target identification task with a partner (either automation or human). The findings suggest that users’ perceived trustworthiness of the partner is affected by reliability groups appropriately, irrespective of risk groups. However, with human partners, although participants fail to calibrate dependence appropriately in low-risk groups, dependence is appropriate in high-risk groups. The finding suggests that the effect of human-like characteristics on trust should not be considered independent of risk. The implications of our findings are discussed in the paper.