Personifying and Objectifying Language as Indicators of Trust, Anthropomorphism, and Team Performance in Command-and-Control Human-Machine Teams

Team communication facilitates team coordination strategies and situations, and how teammates perceive one another. In human-machine teams, these perceptions affect how people trust and anthropomorphize their machine counterparts, which in turn affects future team communication, forming a feedback loop. This thesis investigates how personifying and objectifying contents in human-machine team communication relate to team performance and perceptions in a simulated remotely piloted aircraft system task environment. A total of 46 participants grouped into teams of two were assigned unique roles and teamed with a synthetic pilot agent that in reality was a trained confederate following a script. Quantities of verbal personifications and objectifications were compared to questionnaire responses about participants’ perceived trust and anthropomorphism of the synthetic pilot, as well as team performance. It was hypothesized that verbal personifications would positively correlate with reflective trust, anthropomorphism, and team performance, and that verbal objectifications would negatively correlate with the same measures. It was also predicted that verbal personifications would decrease over time as human teammates interact more with the machine teammate, and that verbal objectifications would increase. Verbal personifications were not found to be correlated with trust and anthropomorphism outside of perceptions related to gender, albeit patterns of change in the navigator’s personifications coincided with a co-calibration of trust among the navigator and the photographer. Results supported the prediction that verbal objectifications are negatively correlated with trust and anthropomorphism of a teammate. Significant relationships between verbal personifications and objectifications and team performance were not found. This study provides support to the notion that people verbally personify machines to ease communication when necessary, and that the same processes that underlie tendencies to personify machines may be reciprocally related to those that influence team trust. Overall, this study provides evidence that personifying and objectifying language in human-machine team communication is a viable candidate for measuring the perceptions and states of teams, even in highly restricted communication environments.