Communicating Trustworthiness using Radar Graphs: A Detailed Look

Abstract

The amount of trust we, as human-beings, place in each other or an object (e.g., online information) is typically guided by several trust factors and antecedents. These factors can vary in importance depending on the individual making the trust decision and also on the situation – such is actually the subjective nature of trust. In this paper, we explore this notion of factors' importance by delving into detail on some of our recent user experiments and subsequent findings, partly described in previous work. These experiments used radar graphs to communicate trustworthiness as a function of five trust factors, namely competence, popularity, recency, corroboration and proximity. Here, we expand that work by further considering the importance of each of the factors to participants, while also investigating the correlations between individuals' perceptions of trust, and aspects such as graph area or size and expected scores as calculated by linear regression analysis. More specifically, we focus on outliers and endeavour to understand what is the cause of their existence. This research contributes to the field of communicating trustworthiness now, but is also meant to act as a platform for future, more directed research on visuals intended to communicate trustworthiness.