Confluence theory: uniting two houses divided

Abstract

There has been much progress in automation research, with new important hypotheses, and data supporting those hypotheses, in several domains. Although such progress along a variety of different lines is gratifying, there is a need for a unifying theory to provide an integrative theme that incorporates them under a single large umbrella. In pursuit of this objective, we review several domains in the automation literature that hitherto have been considered to be quite disparate and with little in the way of interconnections. Subsequently, we consider a newly proposed theory in social psychology that ties together several domains within that area. After establishing the capability of this theory to account for much of the social psychology literature, we apply it to account for the various automation issues reviewed in the initial section. Finally, we derive a new prediction from this theory and present an experiment to test it.

Keywords:

• confluence
• automation
• trust
• theory

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Amjad Nusayr, Raja Kothembaka and Shane Thomas for their help in programming the simulator. This study was funded by an Air Force Grant (Index no. 111915). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors.