Investigating the Effect of System Reliability, Risk, and Role on Users' Emotions and Attitudes toward a Safety-Critical Drone System

ABSTRACT

In safety-critical systems, it is essential to communicate relevant information to facilitate decision-making, promote trust, and improve performance without overloading users. To explore the effect of system performance information on rational and emotional processing by users, we performed a between-subject experiment in which participants were asked to imagine themselves as a drone operator or system administrator in a high-, medium-, or low-risk scenario. Then, based on their imagined scenario and role, participants rated the relevance of four aspects of system reliability to decision-making with the system, as well as the expected intensity of the GREAT emotions. Results indicate that system performance information affected participants’ reasoning differently depending on risk level. Moreover, participants had different perspectives depending on their role in the system. Those in administrator roles indicated higher respect ratings for those with a similar role. These findings demonstrate that contextual risk and a user’s role can influence emotions and attitudes toward safety-critical computer systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Human-computer Interaction
• Emotions
• Risk

Acknowledgment

This material is based upon work supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under award number FA9550-15-1-0490.

Notes

^1. The entire written descriptions of scenarios are outlined in the Appendix.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yusuf Albayram

Yusuf Albayram is a post-doctoral fellow in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Connecticut where he received his PhD. His main research interests are in the interdisciplinary areas of usable security, human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing.

Theodore Jensen

Theodore Jensen is a PhD student in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Connecticut. His research interests include human-computer trust, affective computing, and the social impacts and dynamics of human-computer interaction.

Mohammad Maifi Hasan Khan

Mohammad Maifi Hasan Khan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Connecticut. He received his PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include usable security, risk communication, and performance modeling of large-scale systems.

Ross Buck

Ross Buck is a Professor of Communication and Psychological Sciences at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. He is the author of Human Motivation and Emotion (Wiley, 1988), The Communication of Emotion (Guilford, 1984), and Emotion: A Biosocial Synthesis (Cambridge, 2014). His current interest is in the neuroscience of empathy.

Emil Coman

Emil Coman is an emotional communication researcher with expertise in statistical modeling of complex causal processes. His research focuses on uncovering what causes health disparities, building, and interpreting evidence for healthcare providers’ use, and translating complex statistical concepts for day to day use by researchers, students, and the general public.