How the packaging of decision explanations affects perceptions of trustworthiness

We used an experimental vignette to examine how two aspects of a decision explanation's packaging - its language and labeling of the decision process - affected perceptions of a decision maker's competency-based trustworthiness. These perceptions were higher when either easy-to-understand language or a legitimating decision process label was present than when both hard-to-understand language and no decision process label were present. These findings suggest that peripheral cues related to decision explanations' packaging may play an important role in improving perceptions of trustworthiness

Trustworthiness of information sources and information pedigrees

To survive, and indeed thrive, in an open heterogenous information sharing environment, an agent's ability to evaluate the trustworthiness of other agents becomes crucial. In this paper, we investigate a procedure for evaluating an agent's trustworthiness as an information source. By separating the procedure into competency analysis and sincerity analysis, we are able to deal with complicated cases involving the passing-on of information, where the same information may reach a receiver agent via different routes. In order to keep information about the source agent we use an information pedigree as a means to maintain the history of communicated information. Our evaluation of trustworthiness can be employed to drive data fusion, weighted knowledge base merging, and multiple source conflict resolution. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002