Based on our recent work on the development of a trust model for recommender agents and a qualitative survey, we explore the potential of building users’ trust with explanation interfaces. We present the major results from the survey, which provided a roadmap identifying the most promising areas for investigating design issues for trust-inducing interfaces. We then describe a set of general principles derived from an in-depth examination of various design dimensions for constructing explanation interfaces, which most contribute to trust formation. We present results of a significantscale user study, which indicate that the organization-based explanation is highly effective in building users’ trust in the recommendation interface, with the benefit of increasing users’ intention to return to the agent and save cognitive effort. Categories and Subject Descriptors