# kaal:position:2026-08-08-149

**Affirmed position.** 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.

**Status.** affirmed  **Published.** 2026-08-08

**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: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/h9urp

**Extends.** kaal:claim:6244278-027: https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/6244278-027

**Scholarly basis.** 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 level.** abstract indexed

**Mapping 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 at https://kaal-signal-desk.wulf577462.chatgpt.site/#review.

**Record type.** This is a dated commentary position that extends a scholarly corpus claim. It is not a verbatim claim extracted from the paper.

**Canonical form.** This markdown file is the canonical hashed representation of the position.