External Manifestations of Trustworthiness in the Interface

in Communications of the ACM

Justine Cassell & Tim Bickmore

This article is about the kind of trust that is demonstrated in human face-to-face interaction, and approaches to and benefits of having our computer interfaces depend on these same manifestations of trustworthiness. In making technology that is actually trustworthy your morals can really be your only guide. But, assuming that you're a good person, and have built a technology that does what it promises, or that represents people who do what they promise, then read on. We're taking as a point of departure our earlier work on the effects of representing the computer as a human body. Here we are going to argue that interaction rituals among humans, such as greetings, small talk and conventional leavetakings, along with their manifestations in speech and in embodied conversational behaviors, can lead the users of technology to judge the technology as more reliable, competent and knowledgeable - to trust the technology more.