A Social Cognition Perspective on Human–Computer Trust: The Effect of Perceived Warmth and Competence on Trust in Decision-Making With Computers

Abstract

Trust is a crucial guide in interpersonal interactions, helping people to navigate through social decision-making problems and cooperate with others. In human-computer interaction (HCI), trustworthy computer agents foster appropriate trust by supporting a match between their perceived and actual characteristics. As computers are increasingly endowed with capabilities for cooperation and intelligent problem-solving, it is critical to ask under which conditions people discern and distinguish trustworthy from untrustworthy technology. We present an interactive cooperation game framework allowing us to capture human social attributions that indicate trust in continued and interdependent human-agent cooperation. Within this framework, we experimentally examine the impact of two key dimensions of social cognition, warmth and competence, as antecedents of behavioral trust and self-reported trustworthiness attributions of intelligent computers. Our findings suggest that, first, people infer warmth attributions from unselfish vs. selfish behavior and competence attributions from competent vs. incompetent problem-solving. Second, warmth statistically mediates the relation between unselfishness and behavioral trust as well as between unselfishness and perceived trustworthiness. We discuss the possible role of human social cognition for human-computer trust.

Can Robots Earn Our Trust the Same Way Humans Do? A Systematic Exploration of Competence, Warmth, and Anthropomorphism as Determinants of Trust Development in HRI

“…Thus, according to our findings, robot warmth appears to be a possible determinant of trust development in HRI, supporting the transferability of warmth as a determinant of trust development in interpersonal interaction (e.g., Mayer et al, 1995;Fiske et al, 2007) to HRI. In addition, our results are compatible with previous HCI research (e.g., Kulms and Kopp, 2018), implying a positive effect of computer warmth on trust in computers.…”

“…While in HRI research warmth has not been particularly investigated as a potential determinant of trust development, assumptions can be derived from HCI literature. For example, Kulms and Kopp (2018) examined the transferability of interpersonal trust dynamics in the domain of intelligent computers, focusing on competence and warmth as possible determinants of trust in such. Competence was manipulated by means of competent (vs. incompetent) gameplay of the computer and warmth by means of unselfish (vs. selfish) game behavior of the computer.…”

“…In line with the general approach of transferring theories and models of interpersonal interaction to human-computer interaction (HCI) and human-robot interaction (HRI) (e.g., Gockley et al, 2006;Aly and Tapus, 2016), single studies have explored this approach with regard to trust (de Visser et al, 2016;Kulms and Kopp, 2018). Yet, they have mostly focused on single determinants and barely applied systematic manipulations of the determinants in question.…”

“…Namely, in their metanalysis, Hancock et al (2011) found that robot-related performance-based factors (e.g., reliability, false alarm rate, failure rate) were associated with trust development in HRI. Moreover, considering HCI in general, Kulms and Kopp (2018) have found that competence and warmth of a computer are positively related to trust development in computers.…”

Peer Relationships and College Students’ Cooperative Tendencies: Roles of Interpersonal Trust and Social Value Orientation

“…This suggests that college students should fully trust their peers when cooperating, in order to better accomplish common goals. However, interpersonal trust is not a necessary condition for peer cooperation, as cooperation is possible even without trust (Kulms and Kopp, 2018). The current study does not rule out the possibility that there are other mediators by which peer relationships can change the behavior by influencing the psychological distance between individuals.…”