Question answering systems are rapidly advancing, but their opaque nature may impact user trust. We explored trust through an anti-monitoring framework, where trust is predicted to be correlated with presence of citations and inversely related to checking citations. We tested this hypothesis with a live question-answering experiment that presented text responses generated using a commercial Chatbot along with varying citations (zero, one, or five), both relevant and random, and recorded if participants checked the citations and their self-reported trust in the generated responses. We found a significant increase in trust when citations were present, a result that held true even when the citations were random; we also found a significant decrease in trust when participants checked the citations. These results highlight the importance of citations in enhancing trust in AI-generated content.
@article{arxiv.2501.01303,
title = {Citations and Trust in LLM Generated Responses},
author = {Yifan Ding and Matthew Facciani and Amrit Poudel and Ellen Joyce and Salvador Aguinaga and Balaji Veeramani and Sanmitra Bhattacharya and Tim Weninger},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.01303},
year = {2025}
}