My Actions Speak Louder Than Your Words: When User Behavior Predicts Their Beliefs about Agents' Attributes

A widely cited explanation for how humans think about trustworthiness posits that people consider three factors, or traits, of a person (or agent) when they evaluate trustworthiness: ability, benevolence, and integrity [20]. It is common practice for intelligent agent researchers to adapt a psychometric inventory of this three-factor model of trustworthiness for assessing users' perceived trustworthiness of agents [19]. In theory, administering the inventory prior to an interaction allows researchers to assess the role of anticipated agent trustworthiness in users' behavior, while post hoc administration allows researchers to assess whether particular elements of an interaction, perhaps an experimental manipulation, impacted users' opinions of the agent. In practice, however, people frequently misuse information when they form judgments and make decisions [11, 17]. For example, a person who is momentarily happy (sad), perhaps from reminiscing about a positive (negative) event from their recent past, is likely to rate their life satisfaction as higher (lower) than if you asked them when they were in a neutral state [25]. Regardless of the saliency of information, the normative approach is to always use it the same way.