The relationship of trust and dependence

Abstract

The concepts of automation trust and dependence have often been viewed as closely related and on occasion, have been conflated in the research community. Yet, trust is a cognitive attitude and dependence is a behavioural measure, so it is unsurprising that different factors can affect the two. Here, we review the literature on the correlation between trust and dependence. On average, this correlation across people was quite low, suggesting that people who are more trusting of automation do not necessarily depend upon it more. Separately, we examined experiments that explicitly manipulated the reliability of automation, finding that higher automation reliability increased trust ratings twice as fast as dependence behaviours. This review provides novel quantitative evidence that the two constructs are not strongly correlated. Implications of this work, including potential moderating variables, contexts where trust is still relevant, and considerations of trust measurement, are discussed.

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