Being there versus seeing there: trust via video

Abstract

We studied the emergence of trust in a social dilemma game in four different communication situations: face-to-face, video, audio, and text chat. Three-person groups did 30 rounds of a social dilemma game and we measured trust by the extent to which they cooperated vs. competed. The face-to-face groups quickly achieved cooperative behavior, while the text chat groups continued to compete throughout. The video groups achieved the same levels of trust as the face-to-face groups, although perhaps a bit more slowly. The audio group was intermediate. These results show that trust can emerge through mediated communication.