Physiological Measurement of Trust-Related Behavior in Trust-Neutral and Trust-Critical Situations

In this paper we present results of a user study that we conducted with 21 subjects to investigate whether initial user trust is accompanied by unconscious bodily responses which enable more objective measurements than user reports. In particular, we recorded the user’s eye gaze and heart rate to evaluate whether users respond differently when interacting with a web page that is supposed to build initial trust as opposed to a web page that lacks this capability. Our results indicate that there are significantly different response patterns to trust-critical and trust-neutral situations during the interaction with a web page depending on whether the web page has helped users form initial trust or not. Knowledge of trust-related behavior can help to manage user trust at the runtime of the system since different usage phases can continuously be interpreted in order to detect situations which need to be considered to re-cover user trust.