George Mason University News | By Michele McDonald | Posted: February 4, 2015


By studying how people build interpersonal trust, George Mason University researchers are finding out how to create a similar bond between humans and machines. The work could change how we interact with the machines around us. Frank Krueger, a cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist at George Mason, is working on a three-year, $700,000 grant from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research to look at human-to-machine trust. “Our brains haven’t caught up with all the change around us and that includes how we interact with machines,” says Krueger, co-director of the Center for the Study of Neuroeconomics. “The brain is still living as if we are hunter-gatherers even though we’re surrounded by high-tech tools.”