Author

Derek Koehl

Date of Award

2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Psychology

Committee Chair

Lisa Vangsness

Committee Member

Jodi Price

Committee Member

Nathan Tenhundfeld

Research Advisor

Lisa Vangsness

Subject(s)

Trust, Automation--Psychological aspects, Automation--Human factors, Natural language processing (Computer science)

Abstract

This thesis explores the measurement of trust in the context of human interactions with automated systems. Trust is influenced by factors like perceived ability, benevolence, and integrity which presents a measurement challenge. Given the lack of a universally accepted model for trust, there is an abundance of trust measurement methods in the literature. This research aimed to ascertain the reliability of NLP-based measurements to determine whether such methods can shed light on the dimensionality of trust as a construct and to isolate a Linguistic Fingerprint™ of trust. The results lent support to trust as a unidimensional construct. There was little predictive difference between congruent models (e.g., predicting trust using trust sentences) and incongruent models (e.g., predicting trust using distrust sentences). In addition to contributing to the theoretical debate as to the nature of the construct of trust, these findings have implications for the feasibility of developing real-world trust measurement tools.

Available for download on Wednesday, May 06, 2026

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