Building Contextualized Trust Profiles in Conditionally Automated Driving

Trust is crucial for ensuring the safety, security, and widespread adoption of automated vehicles (AVs), and if trust is lacking, drivers and the general public may hesitate to embrace this technology. This research seeks to investigate contextualized trust profiles in order to create personalized experiences for drivers in AVs with varying levels of reliability. A driving simulator experiment involving 70 participants revealed three distinct contextualized trust profiles (i.e., <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">confident copilots</i>, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">myopic pragmatists</i>, and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">reluctant automators</i>) identified through K-means clustering, and analyzed in relation to drivers' dynamic trust, dispositional trust, initial learned trust, personality traits, and emotions. The experiment encompassed eight scenarios where participants were requested to take over control from the AV in three conditions: a control condition, a false alarm condition, and a miss condition. To validate the models, a multinomial logistic regression model was constructed using the shapley additive explanations explainer to determine the most influential features in predicting contextualized trust profiles, achieving an F1-score of 0.90 and an accuracy of 0.89. In addition, an examination of how individual factors impact contextualized trust profiles provided valuable insights into trust dynamics from a user-centric perspective. The outcomes of this research hold significant implications for the development of personalized in-vehicle trust monitoring and calibration systems to modulate drivers' trust levels, thereby enhancing safety and user experience in automated driving.