On trust in humans and trust in artificial intelligence: A study with samples from Singapore and Germany extending recent research

The AI revolution is shaping societies around the world. People interact daily with a growing number of products and services that feature AI integration. Without doubt rapid developments in AI will bring positive outcomes, but also challenges. In this realm it is important to understand if people trust this omni-use technology, because trust represents an essential prerequisite (to be willing) to use AI products and this in turn likely has an impact on how much AI will be embraced by national economies with consequences for the local work forces. To shed more light on trusting AI, the present work aims to understand how much the variables trust in AI and trust in humans overlap. This is important to understand, because much is already known about trust in humans, and if the concepts overlap, much of our understanding of trust in humans might be transferable to trusting AI. In samples from Singapore (n = 535) and Germany (n = 954) we could observe varying degrees of positive relations between the trust in AI/humans variables. Whereas trust in AI/humans showed a small positive association in Germany, there was a moderate positive association in Singapore. Further, this paper revisits associations between individual differences in the Big Five of Personality and general attitudes towards AI including trust.

The present work shows that trust in humans and trust in AI share only small amounts of variance, but this depends on culture (varying here from about 4 to 11 percent of shared variance). Future research should further investigate such associations but by also considering assessments of trust in specific AI-empowered-products and AI-empowered-services, where things might be different.