# AI trust and information seeking

How people respond when a chatbot gives a clear or vague answer.

## Research question

When a chatbot gives a clear or vague answer, how does that affect whether people trust it or ask for more information? This collaboration examines that question in a trivia task. It also asks whether differences in thinking style, tolerance of uncertainty, and perceived social connection to the chatbot help explain people’s responses.

## Experiment platform

Onur Bal built a web platform to deliver chat tasks and record behavior during the experiment. The project uses a Wizard-of-Oz design to control the information available in the answers and examine how participants respond.

[Onur Bal’s research CV](https://onurbal.com/en/about/)

## Conference record

The Association for Psychological Science listed this work in its May 2026 poster program in Barcelona. The program credits Burcu Ünlütabak as presenting author and lists İlayda Velioğlu, Onur Bal, Aleyna Külekçi, Fahimah Saiyed, Erin Fernandes, Ayesha Shafiullah, and Reem Bochor as coauthors. The abstract describes the research questions and design.

[Read the APS conference abstract](https://www.psychologicalscience.org/conventions/archive/2026annual/paper/60661/)

## Related work

[Children’s questions to voice assistants](/research/children-voice-assistants.md) · [Research on theory of mind in language models](/research/theory-of-mind.md)

---

[Curtainplate Laboratories](/index.md) · [Research](/research.md) · [People](/people.md) · [Publications](/publications.md) · [About](/about.md) · [Contact](/contact.md) · [Join us](/join.md) · [Take part](/participate.md) · [Privacy](/privacy.md)