I'm Only Human: The Effects of Trust Dampening by Anthropomorphic Agents

Theodore Jensen, Mohammad Maifi Hasan Khan

Abstract: The increasing prevalence of automated and autonomous systems necessitates design that facilitates user trust calibration. Trust repair and trust dampening have been suggested as behaviors with which a system can correct inappropriate states of user trust, yet trust dampening has received less attention in the literature. This paper aims to address this with a 2 (agent anthropomorphism: low, high) \(\times \) 3 (message: control, apology, trust dampening) between-subject experiment which observes the effects of trust dampening delivered by anthropomorphic interface agents. Agent stimuli were chosen based on a pretest of 58 participants, after which the main experiment was conducted online with 225 participants. Results indicate that trust dampening increased perceptions of system integrity and may improve trust appropriateness, suggesting that lowering expectations via trust dampening messages is a viable approach for automated system designers.