Machine Heuristic: When We Trust Computers More than Humans with Our Personal Information

By Shyam Sundar, Jinyoung Kim. International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2019

370 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this day and age of identity theft, are we likely to trust machines more than humans for handling our personal information? We answer this question by invoking the concept of "machine heuristic," which is a rule of thumb that machines are more secure and trustworthy than humans. In an experiment (N = 160) that involved making airline reservations, users were more likely to reveal their credit card information to a machine agent than a human agent. We demonstrate that cues on the interface trigger the machine heuristic by showing that those with higher cognitive accessibility of the heuristic (i.e., stronger prior belief in the rule of thumb) were more likely than those with lower accessibility to disclose to a machine, but they did not differ in their disclosure to a human. These findings have implications for design of interface cues conveying machine vs. human sources of our online interactions.

Subfields: Information Systems, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/638b4f6359716abec17512a458c48dacfac5446a

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Citations in the corpus

How Do AI-driven Chatbots Impact User Experience? Examining Gratifications, Perceived Privacy Risk, Satisfaction, Loyalty, and Continued Use (2020, background): “Moreover, compared to human agents, machine agents might be more objective, and they could solve problems more precisely and efficiently, thereby contributing to stronger medium appeals among current adopters (Sundar & Kim, 2019).”
Algorithmic management in a work context (2021, background): “…understanding or critiquing algorithmic systems echoes similar observations regarding a “machine heuristic”, which refers to mental shortcuts used to imply that interactions with machines (as opposed to another human being) can be more trustworthy, unbiased, or altruistic (Sundar and Kim, 2019).”
Uncertainty as a Form of Transparency: Measuring, Communicating, and Using Uncertainty (2020, background): “When lacking either the ability or motivation to perform an analytic evaluation, people rely more on the affective or heuristic route [147, 169].”
UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Privacy concerns in chatbot interactions (neutral): “Furthermore, we measured power usage [29], belief in machine heuristic [34], and enjoyment [23] as control variables.”