The Effects of Asset Degradation on Human Trust in Swarms

Exploring the Effects of Swarm Degradations on Trustworthiness Perceptions, Reliance Intentions, and Reliance Behaviors

“…Past research shows that people find it difficult to understand swarm performance in tasks such as shape configuration (Nam et al, 2017). Recently, however, research has shown that in a target foraging task, people do ascribe differential intentions to rely on swarms with varying levels of asset degradation in a future target foraging task (Capiola et al, 2020). The current paper explored the relation between trust-relevant criterion in HSwI and whether swarm asset degradations influence trustworthiness perceptions, reliance intentions, and reliance behaviors.…”

“…Participants engaged in several rounds of the swarm foraging task (see Capiola et al, 2020) within a simulator developed in past literature (Walker et al, 2012). Participants viewed simulations of swarms comprising 256 assets forage for targets in an unknown space.…”

“…Thus, research is needed to isolate the factors that shape trust toward swarms to inform more optimal design of and training with swarm technologies. Recent research has demonstrated that differential proportions of asset degradations impact operators' trust toward swarms in target foraging tasks (Capiola et al, 2020). Although previous research has demonstrated manipulating the swarm's degradations can influence intentions to rely on those swarms (Capiola et al, 2020), participants were not given the opportunity to interact with the swarm.…”

“…Recent research has demonstrated that differential proportions of asset degradations impact operators' trust toward swarms in target foraging tasks (Capiola et al, 2020). Although previous research has demonstrated manipulating the swarm's degradations can influence intentions to rely on those swarms (Capiola et al, 2020), participants were not given the opportunity to interact with the swarm. Further, the performance of the swarm did not impact the earnings participant received.…”

“…The simulator (Walker et al, 2012) was produced in Microsoft Visual Studio 2017. The same parameters (i.e., percent of degradations, number of targets, no-fly zone locations) used by Capiola et al (2020) were also used in this study. Degraded assets and no-fly zones were shown in red.…”