Comparing Human Trust Attitudes Towards Human and Agent Teammates

Abstract

Agents' roles in our lives increasingly matter as they engage with people in a variety of important tasks. To achieve successful human-agent teamwork, it is critical to know the differences and similarities in people's attitudes towards human and agent teammates in virtual environments. It is unclear to what extent we can rely on the rich literature on interpersonal trust, i.e., trust between humans, while designing trustworthy agent teammates for human-agent teamwork and constructing hypotheses for human-agent trust research. This study empirically investigates the differences in the growth of human trust in and reliance on human and agent teammates during initial interactions. We developed a team coordination game, the Game of Trust, in which two players repeatedly cooperate to complete team tasks without prior assignment of subtasks. The effects of teammate type, i.e., human vs. agent, are evaluated by performing an extensive set of controlled experiments with participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk. We collect both teamwork performance data as well as surveys to gauge participants' trust in their teammates. The empirical results show that humans' trust attitudes towards human and agent teammates differ: trust in and reliance on teammate and team performance were slightly higher when playing with the agent teammate. Moreover, the level of trustworthiness of a teammate is more influential on human trust compared to teammate type. These findings enhance our understanding of changes in human trust concerning teammate type towards achieving successful virtual teamwork.