Are People Accurate at Self-Assessing Their Consistency of Attitudes Towards Automation?

There have been very few studies that have looked at attitudes or the consistency of attitudes towards automation. The purpose of the current study was to examine how consistent people think they are in their attitudes towards automation. In two studies, participants were presented with a list of devices and were asked how they felt about the automation that operates that device. After completing the first block of responses, participants then completed a second identical block. This was done in order to determine what the consistency coefficient was between blocks of trials. Participants were then asked how consistently they thought they had answered during the two blocks of trials. In both studies, the correlation between the actual consistency and the self-assessment of consistency was quite low. These results indicate that, in general, participants were not accurate in their self-assessments of consistency.