System-Wide Trust: The Impact of an Error in a Multi-component System

Given the rise of automation adoption in a variety of industries, it is essential we understand how individuals perceive these systems. Previous studies have found that a failure of one component in a system leads to decreased trust across a whole system, but few, if any, studies have considered how users define the confines of a system. To address this gap, this study replicated and extended Mehta et al. (2019) by incorporating measures of trust, similarity, and functional relatedness between six human crew members and six automated components. We noted that our functional relatedness and similarity measures were predictors of the magnitude of trust difference between conditions, with a high degree of shared variance. Our lack of a within subjects design means that future studies should further test whether measures approximating perceptions of ‘system’ (e.g., perceived functional relatedness and similarity) predict the size of contagion effects.