The effect of external safeguards on human-information system trust in an information warfare environment

The modern military command and control (C2) center collects a massive amount of information that is both complex and contradictory. The amount of collected information is often more than can be effectively and efficiently understood by humans. Therefore, today´s decision-makers have become reliant upon information systems to filter through the information and fuse that information into a computer representation of the battle space. The degree of reliance placed in these systems by the decision-makers suggests a significant level of trust. Trust theories and models are rich in the literature, but few have been developed for the human-computer trust relationship. A recent model of trust was found that was both broad in scope and supportive of human-computer trust theories. This model was used to explore the decision-maker´s trust in information systems in a C2 environment. Given the vulnerability of information systems to information security incidents such as hacking and data manipulation, this study set out to examine if the presence of such incidents would effect the decision-makers trusting behavior. This study also examined if the use of such external safeguards, such as the computer emergency response teams (CERT) and the network risk assessment certifications, would affect the decision-maker. Two laboratory experiments were conducted with military personnel using a high-fidelity C2. The findings from both experiments suggest that the presence of information security incidents in a fast-paced C2 environment have no effect on the decision-makers trusting behavior. Decision-makers continued to trust information systems even though information security incidents occurred.