Human trust in otherware – a systematic literature review bringing all antecedents together

Technological systems are becoming increasingly smarter, which causes a shift in the way they are seen: from tools used to execute specific tasks to social counterparts with whom to cooperate. To ensure that these interactions are successful, trust has proven to be the most important driver. We conducted an extensive and structured review with the goal to reveal all previously researched antecedents influencing the human trust in technology-based counterparts. In doing so, we synthesised 179 papers and uncovered 479 trust antecedents. We assigned these antecedents to four main groups. Three of them have been explored before: environment, trustee, and trustor. Within this paper, we argue for a fourth group, the interaction. This quadripartition allows the inclusion of antecedents that were not considered previously. Moreover, we critically question the practice of uncovering more and more trust antecedents, which already led to an opaque plethora and thus becomes increasingly complex for practitioners. Practitioner summary: Future designers of intelligent and interactive technology will have to consider trust to a greater extent. We emphasise that there are far more trust antecedents – and interdependencies – to consider than the ethically motivated discussions about “Trustworthy AI” suggest. For this purpose, we derived a trust map as a sound basis.