When Transparency Fails: Compliance with Decision Support in Nautical Collision Avoidance

Abstract

To attempt to counter uncalibrated compliance with an automated decision aid, the current study sought to introduce some level of transparency into the system’s recommendations. An experiment was conducted using a simple, simulated maritime collision avoidance task featuring an imperfect, but highly reliable, de-cision aid. Specifically, the aid’s recommendations were sometimes paired with a single confidence meas-ure associated with the actual level of difficulty of the trial. Compliance with the aid produced safer out-comes in terms of miss distance at closest point of approach. However, transparency in the form of confi-dence measures did not increase overall compliance with the aid, nor affect the safety of maneuvers. Im-plications for transparency and compliance are discussed.