The dynamics of trust: Comparing humans to automation

Complex industrial environments involve cooperation between operators and a utomation. The strategies used to allocate tasks to automation are a crucia l component of that cooperation and are known to be affected by the operato rs' trust in the automation. In 2 simulated process control experiments, th e authors compared trust in automation with trust in human partners in equi valent situations. Experiment 1 found the relationship between trust and ta sk allocation to be qualitatively identical, but quantitatively attenuated, for human partners as compared with automation. Experiment 2 additionally identified the operators' trustworthiness, as they thought it would be perc eived by a human partner, as crucial to task allocation under human collabo ration but not under automation. The results imply that human collaboration benefits from calibration of people's assessment of how others perceive th em.