At the end of February, we presented a poster at the conference “Trusting in Care Technology or Reliance on Socio-technical Constellation?” at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (organized by Gesa Lindemann and Hironori Matzusaki, University of Oldenburg).
The talks looked at the topic of trust in care technology from different perspectives: Philosophy of technology, sociology, human factors as well as work science contributions were presented and we learned a lot about the complex mechanism of trust.
Our contribution was focused on the special influence of the embodiment of an artificial agent (e.g. a language assistance system or a robot) on the dynamic development of trust. Based on various theoretical approaches, we have developed a model that – regardless of the embodiment (i.e. virtual or physical) – distinguishes between two levels of reference that become relevant when assessing trustworthiness or the need for trust: On the one hand, the so-called ‘mind’ layer (mind level) and, on the other hand, the so-called ‘body’ layer (body level). The concrete relationship between these factors – a virtual avatar can also be evaluated on the body level – results in a concrete measure of required trust, which we have named ‘agentic performance trust’. We plan to test this concept in future empirical work.
The poster can be accessed as PDF (513 kb.)
The picture shows Manuela Marquardt in conversation with Philip Nickel from Eindhoven University of Technology.