Decision-making in abstract trust games: A user interface perspective

To understand the processes involved in trust-based judgments in a computer-mediated multi-agent setting, a user interface (UI) was developed and an experiment was devised based on the Iterated Diner´s Dilemma, a variation of the n-player Prisoner´s Dilemma. Analysis of the experiment resulted in two major findings: (1) UI composition and information presentation have an impact on human trust and cooperation behavior, and (2) a strong positive correlation between Situation Awareness (SA) and performance is confirmed. There was a significant effect for UI levels on our main performance metric, total participant dining points., at the p=0.041 level. Also, there was a marginal effect for UI levels on participant cooperation at the p=0.084 level. Total participant dining points and SA were strongly correlated, r (92) = 0.62. Similarly, participant cooperation and SA were strongly correlated, r (92) = 0.61.