Abstract
Computer code has entered our society in contexts ranging from medical to manufacturing settings. The current study expanded previous literature by examining the effects of three between-subject factors (i.e., reputation, organization, and readability) on various trust-related outcomes. Participants (N = 54) were computer programmers recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). We used a 2 (reputable or non-reputable source) × 3 (high, medium, or low organization) × 3 (high, medium, or low readability) between-subjects design to examine how the independent variables interact to predict the trustworthiness perceptions of the code. The results show that programmers perceive code differently when coming from reputable sources. Thus, it is important to highlight whether or not any open source code comes from a reputable source and make this information readily available to programmers. Another trend we found is that programmers tend to prefer conspicuously high or low organization, particularly when readability is low. Thus, a medium level of organization could obfuscate the goals of the original programmer, which may undermine the programmer’s intent and reduce code trustworthiness.
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DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT A. Approved for public release: 88ABW-2020-0095;
Cleared 13 Jan 2020. This research was supported in part by an appointment to the Postgraduate Research Participant Program at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, 711th Human Performance Wing, Airman Systems Directorate, Warfighter Interface Division, Collaborative Interfaces and Teaming Branch, Collaborative Teaming Section administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education through an interagency agreement between the U.S. Department of Energy and USAFRL.
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Alarcon, G.M., Gibson, A.M., Jessup, S.A., Capiola, A., Raad, H., Lee, M.A. (2020). Effects of Reputation, Organization, and Readability on Trustworthiness Perceptions of Computer Code. In: Kurosu, M. (eds) Human-Computer Interaction. Human Values and Quality of Life. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12183. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49065-2_26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49065-2_26
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