Trust Rules for Trust Dilemmas: How Decision Makers Think and Act in the Shadow of Doubt

• Authors: Roderick M. Kramer
• Venue: Proceedings of the workshop on Deception, Fraud, and Trust in Agent Societies held during the Autonomous Agents Conference: Trust in Cyber-societies, Integrating the Human and Artificial Perspectives
• Year: 2000

Trust has long been recognized as an important antecedent of cooperative behaviour. For example, trust facilitates the productive exchange of informaion in collaborative relationships. Central to the decision to trust another individual in such situations is the trust dilemma: even though recognizing the benefits of trust, individuals recognize also the prospect that their trust might be betrayed. Thus, they must decide how much trust (or distrust) is warranted. At a psychological level, this trust dilemma is animated by social uncertainty (uncertainty regarding the other party's motives, intentions and actions). Using a computer simulation methodology, this paper investigates the comparative efficacy of different decision rules regarding trust in a simulated trust dilemma. The results demonstrate that attributional generosity (operationalized as giving the other party the benefit of the doubt) facilitates the development and maintance of more cooperative relationships when social uncertainty is present.