From Initial to Situational Automation Trust: The Interplay of Personality, Interpersonal Trust, and Trust Calibration in Young Males
DOI: 10.3390/bs16020176
archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified
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Summary
This study investigates the evolution of trust in automation, specifically examining how stable individual differences (personality and interpersonal trust) influence initial trust expectations and subsequent situational trust calibration during driving. The research addresses a critical gap in human–machine interaction literature: the lack of understanding regarding how trait-level characteristics translate into dynamic behavioral and physiological responses across different automation levels. The authors propose a framework distinguishing between stable traits, initial trust (pre-interaction expectations), and situational trust (dynamic calibration via gaze, physiology, and behavior). The researchers conducted a driving simulator experiment with 30 young male participants, comparing manual (Level 0), semi-automated (Level 2), and fully automated (Level 4) driving conditions. The study combined eye-tracking data (pupillometry and fixation duration) with psychometric assessments, including the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ), Interpersonal Trust Scale (ITS), and Trust in Automation (TIA) scale. Participants performed collision avoidance tasks while their reaction times, hazard detection sensitivity, and physiological workload were recorded. Statistical analyses included linear mixed-effects models for reaction times, signal detection theory for hazard discrimination, and mediation analysis to explore trait pathways. Results indicated that semi-automation yielded higher hazard detection sensitivity ($d' = 0.81$) compared to full automation but imposed greater physiological costs, evidenced by larger pupil diameters ($\eta_p^2 = 0.445$) and increased fixation on instrument displays. Manual driving produced significantly faster reaction times than both automated conditions. Crucially, mediation analysis revealed that neuroticism influenced initial trust in automation indirectly through interpersonal trust. A paradoxical "social complacency" effect was observed: individuals with high interpersonal trust exhibited slower reaction times in semi-automated conditions ($B = 0.60, p = 0.035$), despite reporting lower initial trust. This suggests that high interpersonal trust leads to implicit behavioral reliance on the system, reducing readiness to intervene. The findings imply that situational trust is a multi-layered calibration process involving dissociated attentional, perceptual, and behavioral mechanisms. The study concludes that semi-automation induces a high-effort monitoring state that does not necessarily improve behavioral readiness. The identified "wary but complacent" driver profile highlights a risk where social faith in partners translates to dangerous lethargy with machine agents. These results suggest that human–machine interfaces for semi-automated vehicles require adaptive interventions, such as multimodal alerts tailored to individual trust profiles, to counteract complacency and ensure timely takeover responses.
Key finding
Trust in automation calibrates across personality, initial expectations, and situation-specific gaze/behavior, with high interpersonal trust producing a 'wary but complacent' young-male driver who has slower reaction times in semi-automation despite reporting low initial trust.
Methodology
simulator
Sample size: 30
Provenance
The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed. Discovered via canonical_url on 2026-05-03 (10 acquisition events logged).
| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-05-03 |
| archive | success | — | — | — | 5 | 2026-05-04 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
| clean | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-01 |
| chunk | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-01 |
| embed | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-02 |
| enrich | success | openalex | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-01 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-05-03 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 16 | 2026-06-11 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.
Topics
Ranked by relevance to this paper. Hover a topic for its definition.
- trust calibration
- trust in automation foundations
- automation
- automation surprise
- automation complacency bias
- acceptance adoption
Information type
What kind of knowledge this paper contributes, grouped by family — independent of topic (what it is about) and method (how it was studied).
- Empirical Findings: self report data, behavioral performance data
- Methodological Resource: validation psychometrics