When do researchers trust AI? Trust, accuracy, and experience in the use of generative AI

Generative AI (GenAI) is increasingly part of academic work – from literature searches to coding and writing. At the same time, its processes are opaque and its outputs can be misleading, so relying on it is inherently risky. How do researchers decide whether to use these tools?

What we did

Building on trust theory and a stimulus–organism–response logic, we tested whether perceived accuracy shapes researchers’ intention to use GenAI via trust, and whether this depends on their experience with GenAI. We conducted two online studies with a total of 402 researchers:

• Study 1 (N = 232) used a three-wave longitudinal design with one-week lags, measuring perceived accuracy, trust, and usage intention at separate time points.
• Study 2 (N = 170) was a vignette experiment in which we manipulated the accuracy of ChatGPT’s recommendations.

What we found

• Researchers who perceived GenAI as more accurate trusted it more, and trust in turn predicted their intention to use it. In the experiment, more accurate recommendations increased trust.
• Trust thus explained (mediated) the link between accuracy and usage intention.
• Experience was a boundary condition: the more familiar researchers were with GenAI, the weaker the link between trust and usage intention.

What this means

For novices, trust works more like a heuristic – a shortcut for deciding whether to rely on a tool – and it becomes less relevant as experience grows. This suggests that, especially for less experienced users, it matters whether their trust is well-founded: helping researchers evaluate the accuracy of AI output supports calibrated rather than simply high trust.

Read the paper

Kleine, A.-K., Schaffernak, I., & Lermer, E. (2026). When do researchers trust AI? Trust as a mediator and experience as a boundary condition in researchers’ intentions to use generative AI. Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans, 8, 100310. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chbah.2026.100310