Initial Results From an Interdisciplinary Review of Trust Research

In the days of modern engineering, a complex system can be designed and built using numerous sources of information, knowledge, hardware, and software. A factor that impacts the success of a complex system is trust. In designing a framework that allows for a unified trust model or trusting picture and defining a reliable metric for measuring trustworthiness, we are examining definitions and methodologies from social sciences and engineering. This paper uses a combination of publication analysis of research literature including psychological, sociological, economic, automation, and cyberspace perspectives of trust and technical dialogues with the subject matter experts at the Air Force Research Laboratory, to illuminate the interdisciplinary approach undertaken in hardware centric design with human interface. We review past work to highlight trustworthiness characteristics and trust measurements that conceptually could apply across fields under examination. We expect to create a more rigorous definition of trust and trustworthiness that leads to finding the appropriate metrics to measure trust and trustworthiness dynamically.