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.

Practitioner summary:

Trust in automation is a cognitive attitude, and dependence on automation is a physical behaviour. Therefore, it is important to understand the differences between the two, especially as they have been conflated in the literature. This review highlights the small average correlation in the literature between subjective trust and objective dependence, which suggests that measuring trust as dependence (or vice versa) may not be valid. This suggests, then, that practitioners should carefully consider how trust and dependence are being measured in a given context so as not to incorrectly conflate the two.

Keywords:

• Trust
• dependence
• human-automation interaction

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Eli Stovall for his invaluable help in the collection of relevant articles.

Authors’ note

An initial version of this review was developed for a doctoral dissertation by the first author. Colleen E. Patton retains copywrite of that work, and this review has been sufficiently changed and expanded. The initial version can be found through the citation: Patton, C. E. (2023). The Influence of Trust, Self-Confidence and Task Difficulty on Automation Use (Doctoral dissertation, Colorado State University).

Ethics statement

The ethics statement does not apply here, as no human subject data was collected.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.