The Effect of Culture on Trust in Automation: Reliability and Workload

Abstract

Trust in automation has become a topic of intensive study since the late 1990s and is of increasing importance with the advent of intelligent interacting systems. While the earliest trust experiments involved human interventions to correct failures/errors in automated control systems, a majority of subsequent studies have investigated information acquisition and analysis decision aiding tasks such as target detection for which automation reliability is more easily manipulated. Despite the high level of international dependence on automation in industry, almost all current studies have employed Western samples primarily from the U.S. The present study addresses these gaps by running a large sample experiment in three (U.S., Taiwan, and Turkey) diverse cultures using a “trust sensitive task” consisting of both automated control and target detection subtasks. This article presents results for the target detection subtask for which reliability and task load were manipulated. The current experiments allow us to determine whether reported effects are universal or specific to Western culture, vary in baseline or magnitude, or differ across cultures. Results generally confirm consistent effects of manipulations across the three cultures as well as cultural differences in initial trust and variation in effects of manipulations consistent with 10 cultural hypotheses based on Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions and Leung and Cohen's theory of Cultural Syndromes. These results provide critical implications and insights for correct trust calibration and to enhance human trust in intelligent automation systems across cultures. Additionally, our results would be useful in designing intelligent systems for users of different cultures. Our article presents the following contributions: First, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first set of studies that deal with cultural factors across all the cultural syndromes identified in the literature by comparing trust in the Honor, Face, Dignity cultures. Second, this is the first set of studies that uses a validated cross-cultural trust measure for measuring trust in automation. Third, our experiments are the first to study the dynamics of trust across cultures.