Associations between Trust Dynamics and Personal Characteristics

While personal characteristics influence people’s snapshot trust towards autonomous systems, their relationships with trust dynamics remain poorly understood. To address this gap, we conducted a human-subject experiment involving 130 participants performing a simulated surveillance task aided by an automated threat detector. A comprehensive pre-experimental survey gathered participants’ personal characteristics measured in 12 constructs and 28 dimensions. We clustered participants’ trust dynamics into three groups, namely Bayesian decision-makers, disbelievers, and oscillators. Subsequently, we identified their distinctive attributes regarding personal characteristics. Results showed that the clusters differ in seven personal characteristics (masculinity, positive affect, extraversion, neuroticism, intellect, performance expectancy, high expectations). Our findings provide implications for designing specialized trust prediction algorithms tailored to each type of trust dynamics and trust-aware agents.