Trust and Situation Awareness in a 3-Player Diner´s Dilemma game

This paper studies the relationship between trust and Situation Awareness (SA) in a 3-Player Iterated Diner´s Dilemma game. We ran an experiment in which 24 participants each played against two computer opponents for six blocks of gameplay, with different opponent strategies in each block. Based on SA theory and design principles, we developed three different user interfaces, each supporting a specific SA Level. Each SA Level is inclusive of components from the previous level(s). We assess several trust-related metrics during the study, including percentage of cooperation over time and subjective level of self-reported trust towards the opponents, and analyze the interdependencies of trust, SA, and opponent strategy. Results from the experiment reveal highest levels of cooperation at SA Level 1 overall, and a higher level of cooperation for the group of cooperation-encouraging opponent strategies at SA Level 1 and 2 compared to cooperation-discouraging strategies. There is also a positive relationship between self-reported trust in the opponents and cooperation behavior for these strategies, but this relationship was not present in the cooperation-discouraging group. These results show that participants do respond to strategy type in terms of behavior, and that cooperation level is an indicator of the trust that participants place in the opponent players when cooperation emerges.