Investigating the Effects of (Empty) Promises on Human-Automation Interaction and Trust Repair

Setting expectations for future behavior with promises is one way to manage human-human trusting relationships. To investigate the effect of promises made by an automated system, we conducted a 2 (reliability: low, high) x 3 (promise type: no-promise, optimistic, realistic) between-subject study where participants collaborated with an Automated Target Detection (ATD) system to classify images in multiple rounds of gameplay. We found that an optimistic promise (i.e., "I promise to do better") initially led to significantly more reliance on automation than a realistic promise (i.e., "I cannot do better than this"), but not in the long-term. High reliability participants relied more on the automation and reported greater perceived trustworthiness compared to low reliability participants. In addition, participants in the no promise group reported a greater degree of frustration compared to the other groups. We discuss the implications of our findings for trust repair in automated systems.