Trust should correspond to Trustworthiness: a Formalization of Appropriate Mutual Trust in Human-Agent Teams

Abstract

In human-agent teams, how one teammate trusts another teammate should correspond to the latter's actual trustworthiness, creating what we would call appropriate mutual trust. Although this sounds obvious, the notion of appropriate mutual trust for human-agent teamwork lacks a formal definition. In this article, we propose a formalization which represents trust as a belief about trustworthiness. Then, we address mutual trust, and pose that agents can use beliefs about trustworthiness to represent how they trust their human teammates, as well as to reason about how their human teammates trust them. This gives us a formalization with nested beliefs about beliefs of trustworthiness. Next, we highlight that mutual trust should also be appropriate, where we define appropriate trust in an agent as the trust which corresponds directly to that agent's trustworthiness. Finally, we explore how agents can define their own trustworthiness, using the concepts of ability, benevolence and integrity. This formalization of appropriate mutual trust can form the base for developing agents which can promote such trust.