An Empirical Model of Cultural Factors on Trust in Automation

Trust is conceived to be an important factor mediating an individual’s reliance on automation. Studies have shown individual and cultural differences as well as tasking context significantly affect an individual’s development of trust behaviors. This paper reports preliminary progress in developing a psychometrically grounded subjective measure of trust in automation. A total of 110 items from 8 existing instruments were considered for inclusion in this instrument using Amazon Mechanical Turk to supply samples. Exploratory factor analysis was performed to determine the dimensionality of the data, with 42 items selected for continued refinement. Our proposed model comprises 3 main constructs (performance expectancy, process transparency, and purpose influence) along with 3 types of moderators (cultural-technological contexts, individual, and cultural differences)