Taking a leap of faith: insights from UK first responders on instantaneous trust

Abstract Autonomous systems’ potential to instruct the public during real-life emergencies to foster instantaneous trust and compliance and their impact on rescue operations remain largely unexplored. To determine the requirements for designing technologies capable of delivering instructions in high-risk situations, we needed to understand the key communication elements for establishing immediate trust dynamics, ultimately fostering compliance and contributing to effective life-saving efforts. This paper adopts a participatory approach to curate perspectives from emergency rescue professionals in the UK, gathered through a survey, whose responses were analysed to identify the themes in the dataset and ultimately to elicit verbal and nonverbal elements and message delivery techniques to address the challenges to compliance in interpersonal communication during emergencies. Participants indicated that the adoption of autonomous systems for communication could positively impact rescue operations. They highlighted that verbal communications need to be concise and informative, while nonverbal cues must effectively reinforce verbal messages under distressful conditions. However, challenges such as accountability, adaptability, reliability, and affordability are still prevalent. We formalise a novel communication model designed to engender instantaneous trust between the rescuer and the rescued. We find that verbal elements in the model must increase the situational awareness of the rescued and sufficiently inform them of the context. In contrast, the nonverbal elements should foster credibility, consistency, reliability and positivity between the communicating parties. Based on the professionals’ responses, we further advance recommendations for the use of autonomous systems in emergency rescue scenarios in terms of increasing accountability and accessibility.