Impact of Perceived Agent Expertise on Trust in Computer Agent Recommendations

Abstract

Computer agents are frequently anthropomorphized, giving them appearances and responses similar to humans. Research has demonstrated that users tend to apply social norms and expectations to such computer agents, and that people interact with computer agents in a similar fashion as they would another human. Perceived expertise has been shown to affect trust in human-human relationships, but the literature investigating how this influences trust in computer agents is limited. The current study investigated the effect of computer agent perceived level of expertise and recommendation reliability on subjective (rated) and objective (compliance) trust during a pattern recognition task. Reliability of agent recommendations had a strong effect on both subjective and objective trust. Expert agents started with higher subjective trust, but showed less trust repair. Agent expertise had little impact on objective trust resiliency or repair.