Proposal submitted: Group & Organizational Management (GOM)

Another collaboration with my good friends and colleagues in the Human Factors Department at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University is under way. We just submitted to the special conceptual issue of Group and Organizational Management.  I'm excited to get our reviews back and see where we go next!

Swift Trust in Humans vs. Robots: Drawing Parallels and Understanding Divergence

Overview

Research has underscored the importance of trust to a team’s effectiveness (de Jong, Dirks, & Gillespie, 2015). Traditionally, trust is developed through repeated positive interactions between parties (McAllister, 1995; Rempel, Holmes, & Zanna, 1985). However, newly-met or temporary teams do not have a past history of collaboration upon which to judge each other’s trustworthiness. Instead, swift trust plays a larger role for these groups. Swift trust occurs when rapid development of interpersonal trust is needed in order to accomplish some team function (Meyerson, Weick, & Kramer, 1996) and is characterized by beliefs in another party’s reliability, capability, and dependability (Crisp & Jarvenpaa, 2013). Swift trust provides teams with a baseline scaffolding of trust that enables early team interactions, which can serve as the foundation to build more stable interpersonal trust longitudinally.

Just as trust is fundamental to human collaboration, trust in robots is critical to human-robot interaction. Meta-analytic evidence has shown that trust in a robot is rooted in performance-based factors such as reliability, predictability, and dependability of the robot (Hancock et al., 2011). This type of trust parallels swift trust, in that both types of trust are based in beliefs that the other party is dependable and reliable. However, it is not certain whether there is substance to the parallels due to a scarcity of research that compares human-human (H-H) trust models with human-robot (H-R) trust models (de Visser, Pak, & Neerincx, 2017).

Given this scarcity, the purpose of this manuscript is threefold: 1) starts a dialogue between the swift trust literature and the H-R literature, 2) evaluates the parallels and divergences between H-H swift trust and H-R trust literature, and 3) provides an agenda to advance research that investigates the shared foundations of H-H and H-R trust.