Users' Trust in Automation: A Cultural Perspective

With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technologies, people have more opportunities to interact and/or collaborate with smart automatic agents than ever before. To establish a successful relationship between humans and automation, trust plays a critical role. Therefore, our understandings of why and how people place and calibrate their trust toward intelligent automation become important but challenging issues. This present paper investigates people's trust in automation from a culture perspective. We conducted an online survey to measure people's general trust in automation and multiple dimensions of cultural tendencies. Our results indicate significant correlations between certain cultural tendencies and trust in automation. For instance, we found that people with more beliefs in horizontal collectivism and individualism also incline to have higher trust in automation. The multiple regression analysis also discovered predictable effects of cultural tendencies on people's trust in automation. These findings are further discussed in this presentation.