Zohar Gilad a PhD student has received the “Best Paper Award” at the IsraHCI 8th conference on Human-Computer Interaction for her paper: “The Effect of Algorithm’s Warmth and Competence Perception on Users’ Trust”

About the research:

We explored the effects of warmth (perceived intent) and competence (perceived ability) perceptions on preference for house pricing algorithms. The results of two studies suggest that both warmth and competence perceptions affect algorithm preferences and that similarly to the judgments of people, there is primacy for warmth perceptions. Moreover, we find a halo effect for warmth – a positive correlation between warmth and competence perceptions among participants who chose a high-warmth system over a high-competence system, but not among participants who chose a high-competence system over a high-warmth system. Our research proposes that it may be vital for system designers to consider and communicate the system’s warmth characteristics to its potential users.