Work

On trust in humans and trust in artificial intelligence: A study with samples from Singapore and Germany extending recent research

Year: 2024

Type: article

Abstract: The AI revolution is shaping societies around the world. People interact daily with a growing number of products and services that feature AI integration. Without doubt rapid developments in AI will bring positive outcomes, but also challenges. In this realm it is important to understand if people trust this omni-use technology, because trust represents an essential prerequisite (to be willing) to use AI products and this in turn likely has an impact on how much AI will be embraced by national economies with consequences for the local work forces. To shed more light on trusting AI, the present work aims to understand how much the variables trust in AI and trust in humans overlap. This is important to understand, because much is already known about trust in humans, and if the concepts overlap, much of our understanding of trust in humans might be transferable to trusting AI. In samples from Singapore (n = 535) and Germany (n = 954) we could observe varying degrees of positive relations between the trust in AI/humans variables. Whereas trust in AI/humans showed a small positive association in Germany, there was a moderate positive association in Singapore. Further, this paper revisits associations between individual differences in the Big Five of Personality and general attitudes towards AI including trust. The present work shows that trust in humans and trust in AI share only small amounts of variance, but this further depends on culture (varying here from about 4-10 percent of shared variance). Future research should further investigate such associations but by also considering assessments of trust in specific AI-empowered-products and AI-empowered-services, where things might be different.

Source: Computers in Human Behavior Artificial Humans

DOI: 10.1016/j.chbah.2024.100070

Authors: Christian Montag, Benjamin Becker, Benjamin J. Li

Institutions: Universität Ulm, University of Hong Kong, Nanyang Technological University

Language: English

Topic: Social Robot Interaction and HRI

Subfield: Social Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $1,500

Funder: Nanyang Technological University