The Effects of Task Difficulty and Stress on Trust in an Automated Navigation Aid

Abstract

Trust is a complex social phenomenon which also affects human interactions with automated systems. Trust in automated systems is comprised of dispositional, learned, and situational trust. The factors that affect situational trust are relatively under-studied in the literature. To further explore factors affecting situational trust in automation, we constructed an experiment using a videogame-like task wherein participants navigated mazes of varying difficulty under the stress of time pressure, aided by a GPS-like navigation aid system which varied in its reliability. Our findings showed that task difficulty and stress had significant effects on participants’ trust in the automated navigation aid. Trust was also affected by the system’s response to errors: participants were slightly less likely to follow the instructions of an automated system that corrected itself. These findings reinforce the importance of considering task and environmental conditions when predicting peoples’ compliance with automated systems under different operating conditions and usage environments.