Qualification: Performance rather than Reputation Affects Humans’ Trust towards an Artificial Agent

Record: kaal:position:2026-08-08-149 · 2026-08-08

Performance rather than Reputation Affects Humans' Trust towards an Artificial Agent reports that stated agent reputation changes self-reported trust before interaction. This qualifies Kaal's trustworthiness mechanism by separating perceived trust induced by a reputation cue from trustworthy behavior produced by validated contribution and reputation-weighted incentives. The experiment does not test that incentive mechanism or show that pre-interaction trust predicts performance.

Affirmed commentary position. This record extends a source-bound scholarly claim but is not a verbatim paper claim.

Holds when

The response is limited to the retrieved source proposition and mapped Kaal claim unless fuller source review supports a broader conclusion.
External evidence level: abstract indexed.
Mapping review tier: substantively reviewed abstract-level qualification.
Primary mapping confidence: 0.62.
The primary mapping cleared the automated ambiguity test; substantive scope remains review-bound.
Evidence is limited to an exact proposition in a Crossref-indexed abstract; full text was not reviewed.
No relationship is treated as external endorsement, citation, causation, or validation of a broader Kaal claim.
The source reports that an artificial agent's stated reputation changes self-reported human trust before interaction. This qualifies Kaal's trustworthiness mechanism by separating perceived trust induced by a reputation cue from trustworthy behavior produced by validated contribution and reputation-weighted incentives; the experiment does not test the latter mechanism or show that pre-interaction trust predicts performance.

Current debate

Performance rather than Reputation Affects Humans’ Trust towards an Artificial Agent

Scholarly basis

kaal:claim:6244278-027
Wulf A. Kaal, AI's Mother's Instinct Engineered Consequence Emergent Ethics and the Institutional Trajectory Toward Agentic Alignment (2026). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6244278
Source PDF sha256: 53533cdcc081184e7a376516ad4fece0a64ce49f6c8931b6a2c2e98ed914a84b

Evidence and mapping

Evidence: abstract indexed
Review tier: substantively reviewed abstract-level qualification
Mapping confidence: 0.62
Mapping ambiguous: false

Topics

reputation economics historical-response scholarly-literature crossref

Provenance

Affirmed in kaal-review:2026-08-08:continuous-crossref-0015-oldest-0050-reviewed-v1 on 2026-08-08. Review record.

Verify

Canonical markdown sha256: e1d84aec9987610eb4dc7afb6a5eb617fd959619ea484f126c075f2bbfee50a2
curl -s https://wulfkaal.github.io/positions/2026-08-08-149.md | sha256sum