Effects of Reputation, Organization, and Readability on Trustworthiness Perceptions of Computer Code

Computer code has entered our society in contexts ranging from medical to manufacturing settings. The current study expanded previous literature by examining the effects of three between-subject factors (i.e., reputation, organization, and readability) on various trust-related outcomes. Participants (N = 54) were computer programmers recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). We used a 2 (reputable or non-reputable source) × 3 (high, medium, or low organization) × 3 (high, medium, or low readability) between-subjects design to examine how the independent variables interact to predict the trustworthiness perceptions of the code. The results show that programmers perceive code differently when coming from reputable sources. Thus, it is important to highlight whether or not any open source code comes from a reputable source and make this information readily available to programmers. Another trend we found is that programmers tend to prefer conspicuously high or low organization, particularly when readability is low. Thus, a medium level of organization could obfuscate the goals of the original programmer, which may undermine the programmer’s intent and reduce code trustworthiness.