Submission 584
From Creepiness to Delegation: Longitudinal Trust Dynamics and Adoption of AI
SymposiumTalk-02
Presented by: Nico Ehrhardt
People increasingly hand important decisions to AI, yet we know little about how day-to-day shifts in perception translate into real delegation and adoption. I present preregistered analyses from a six-wave U.S. panel (N=1,007 at Wave 1; N=434 at Wave 6; ~2-month lags) that followed participants’ “favorite LLM based AI” from late 2024 to mid-2025. At each wave, we measured perceived usefulness and creepiness of that AI, trust in it, willingness to let AI systems make decisions, and behavioral intention to delegate concrete tasks. Wave-6 outcomes capture adoption (number of AI-completed tasks, intention to increase delegation) and perceived side effects (impact on one’s skills, adaptation, anxiety, ethical concern).
Using person-mean–centered mixed models, we test (a) whether within-person changes in usefulness and creepiness forecast next-wave trust, (b) whether trust shifts predict subsequent delegation attitudes and intentions, and (c) whether earlier delegation intentions translate into later adoption. We probe negativity asymmetry (“do losses hurt more than gains?”), nonlinear thresholds in the trust–delegation link, and indirect chains such as creepiness → trust → delegation and trust → delegation → adoption.
The talk highlights when and how small changes in people’s everyday experiences with AI snowball into broader adoption, and when they instead trigger withdrawal and concern.