Communication and Cooperation

The authors focus on trust games in the context of two aspects of communication: content (relevant vs. irrelevant communication) and media-richness (face to face, FtF, vs. computer-mediated communication, CMC). In the trust game they studied, there are two players: first-mover and second-mover. The first-mover received 6$ and she could decide to send any discrete amount of dollars to the second-mover. The amount second-mover received was tripled by the experimenter. Then, from this new amount, the second-mover could send any discrete dollar amount back to the first-mover. Participants were paired randomly and played 3 games in the following order: no-communication game (base condition), relevant or irrelevant CMC communication game, and lastly, relevant or irrelevant FtF communication game. In the two latter cases the communication preceded the execution of the moves. The researchers were interested in 3 dependent variables: trust – defined as the amount of dollars sent by the first-mover, reciprocity – the amount returned by the second-mover, and expectation – the amount the first-mover expected to get back. In general, across all conditions relevance and FtF had positive effects on all dependent variables. Looking into the interactions within conditions, the statistical analysis returned the following main findings (see Fig. 1 for the graph of dependencies among the variables):