Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

While trust in human-autonomy teams (HATs) has been studied at the single-team level for years, the dynamics of trust spreading across multiple interconnected teams—known as Team of Teams (ToT)—remains underexplored. This study investigated how trust spreads between teams within a ToT structure. Using a remotely piloted aircraft system synthetic task environment, 40 HATs distributed across two universities were studied: one human participant (photographer) and two confederates portraying a human navigator and an autonomous pilot teammate (using Wizard of Oz methodology) at each site. Teams were paired into ToTs, with each team working simultaneously on a shared mission involving photographing target waypoints. In one team, trust or distrust toward the autonomous pilot teammate was manipulated through both behavioral (mismatched reported vs. actual UAV settings) and verbal trust/distrust (explicit trust/distrust statements) spreading. Trust was measured using the Multi-Dimensional Measure of Trust (MDMT). Results showed significant differences in trust levels between teams, with both trust/distrust manipulations effectively influencing the directly manipulated team and their partner team. These findings extend our understanding of trust dynamics in distributed team systems and provide insights for designing effective human-autonomy collaboration in interconnected team environments.

Keywords

human-AI teaming multi-team collaboration trust distributed teams

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Antos

De Melo

Gratch

Grosz

(2011). The influence of emotion expression on perceptions of trustworthiness in negotiation. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 25(1), 772–778. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v25i1.7939

Ball

Myers

Heiberg

Cooke

N. J.

Matessa

Freiman

Rodgers

(2010). The synthetic teammate project. Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, 16, 271–299.

Barsade

S. G.

(2002). The ripple effect: Emotional contagion and its influence on group behavior. Administrative Science Quarterly, 47(4), 644–675. https://doi.org/10.2307/3094912

Cadsby

C. B.

Song

(2016). In-group favoritism and moral decision-making. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 128, 59–71. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2016.05.008

Cooke

N. J.

Shope

S. M.

(2005). Synthetic task environments for teams: CERTT’s UAV-STE. In Stanton

Hedge

Brookhuis

Salas

Hendrick

(Eds.), Handbook of human factors and ergonomics methods (pp. 41–46). CRC Press.

Cooke

N. J.

Cohen

M. C.

Fazio

W. C.

Inderberg

L. H.

Johnson

C. J.

Lematta

G. J.

Peel

Teo

(2024). From teams to teamness: Future directions in the science of team cognition. Human Factors, 66(6), 1669–1680. https://doi.org/10.1177/00187208231162449

Cooke

N. J.

Gorman

J. C.

Myers

C. W.

Duran

J. L.

(2013). Interactive team cognition. Cognitive Science, 37(2), 255–285. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12009

Duan

Zhou

Scalia

M. J.

Freeman

Gorman

Tolston

McNeese

N. J.

Funke

(2025). Understanding the processes of trust and distrust contagion in human–AI teams: A qualitative approach. Computers in Human Behavior, 165, 108560. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2025.108560

Dunn

J. R.

Schweitzer

M. E.

(2005). Feeling and believing: The influence of emotion on trust. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88(5), 736–748. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.88.5.736

10.

Gremillion

Metcalfe

J. S.

Marathe

A. R.

Paul

Christensen

J. C.

Drnec

Haynes

Atwater

(2016). Analysis of trust in autonomy for convoy operations. In Micro-and nanotechnology sensors, systems, and applications viii (Vol. 9836, pp. 356–365). SPIE.

11.

Guo

Yang

X. J.

Shi

(2024). Enabling team of teams: A trust inference and propagation (TIP) model in multi-human multi-robot teams. Autonomous Robots, 48, Article 15. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-024-10175-3

12.

Jarvenpaa

S. L.

Knoll

Leidner

D. E.

(1998). Is anybody out there? Antecedents of trust in global virtual teams. Journal of Management Information Systems, 14(4), 29–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.1998.11518185

13.

Jarvenpaa

S. L.

Shaw

T. R.

Staples

D. S.

(2004). Toward contextualized theories of trust: The role of trust in global virtual teams. Information Systems Research, 15(3), 250–267. https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.1040.0028

14.

Kanawattanachai

Yoo

(2007). The impact of knowledge coordination on virtual team performance over time. MIS Quarterly, 31(4), 783–808. https://doi.org/10.2307/25148820

15.

Kelley

J. F.

(1983). An empirical methodology for writing user-friendly natural language computer applications. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 193–196). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/800045.801609

16.

Lee

J. D.

See

K. A.

(2004). Trust in automation: Designing for appropriate reliance. Human Factors, 46(1), 50–80. https://doi.org/10.1518/hfes.46.1.50.30392

17.

McChrystal

G. S.

Collins

Silverman

Fussell

(2015). Team of teams: New rules of engagement for a complex world. Penguin.

18.

Rojas

(2024). Trust is contagious: Social influences in human-human-AI team. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 68(1), 317–322. https://doi.org/10.1177/10711813241262025

19.

Ullman

Malle

B. F

. (2019, March). Measuring gains and losses in human-robot trust: Evidence for differentiable components of trust. In 2019 14th ACM/IEEE international Conference on human-robot interaction (HRI) (pp. 618–619). IEEE.

20.

Zoom Video Communications, Inc. (2020). ZOOM cloud meetings (Version 4.6.9) [Mobile app]. App Store. https://apps.apple.com/app/id546505307

Trust Contagion in Team of Teams (ToT) for Human-Autonomy Teaming

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References