The Medium or the Message? Communication Relevance and Richness in Trust Games

Subjects communicated prior to playing trust games; the richness of the communication media and the topics of conversation were manipulated. Communication richness failed to produce significant differences in first-mover investments. However, the topics of conversation made a significant difference: the amounts sent were considerably higher in the unrestricted communication conditions than in the restricted communication and no-communication conditions. Most importantly, we find that first-movers’ expectations of second-movers’ reciprocation are influenced by communication and strongly predict their levels of investment

Essays on promises, trust and disclosure

Essays on Promises, Trust and Disclosure’ consists of three chapters. The first chapter studies whether disclosure of advisors’ interests to advice recipients can mitigate the problem of biased advice. The results of the study suggest that deceptive advice and mistrust are equally frequent with or without disclosure. The second chapter reports on a study that tests whether people keep their promises because they want their actions to be consistent with their words irrespective of the effect of their promise on the person to whom the promise is made. The results do not provide support for this explanation of promise keeping. In addition, the results suggest that the positive impact of communication on cooperation does not always depend on promises. The final chapter of the thesis studies how promises elicited by one’s partner, as opposed to volunteered promises, affect behavior. No significant differences in promise keeping rates between elicited and voluntary promises are found. Nevertheless, the results also suggest that eliciting a promise from one’s partner might be better than not eliciting it because the latter might be perceived as a signal of mistrust and skepticism by some people

Physiological Synchrony Predicts Cooperative Behavior with High Stakes

Can subconscious bodily responses explain our natural tendency to be trusting and trustworthy towards a stranger? I address this question by conducting, to my knowledge, the first study of physiological synchrony (PS) between pairs of partners playing the trust game face-to-face. Participants were given the choice to send $0,$40, $80, or$120 to their partner; these choices were categorized as showing no, low, medium, and high trust, respectively. Participants were endowed with a more considerable sum of money ($120) than many other trust games (Johnson & Mislin, 2011) to encourage participants to perceive their decisions to have significant consequences, i.e., for ecological validity. Most trust game experiments study college students (Johnson & Mislin, 2011); here participants were working-age adults between the ages of 25–50 from diverse cultural backgrounds. Before making their decisions, partners were given two minutes to interact and make promises to each other about their game decisions. Few studies on the trust game allow participant pairs to communicate face-to-face before making their decisions (Ben-Ner et al., 2011; Johnson & Mislin, 2011; Lev-On et al., 2010; Zak et al. 2022). PS between participants’ skin conductance levels (SCLs) was measured during the interaction period and analyzed using two methods, intersubject correlation (ISC) and dynamic time warping (DTW). The DTW analyses revealed the no trust participants exhibited greater PS than low trust participants. DTW also indicated that high trust individuals exhibited greater PS than low and medium trust individuals, consistent with my expectation. The second mover ISC analysis showed untrustworthy participants exhibited greater PS than trustworthy participants. These findings reveal that participants playing the trust game exhibit PS and engage in no trust, high trust, and untrustworthy behavior, indicating PS, trust, and trustworthy behavior are nonlinear. This is the first study of its kind to demonstrate that individuals display PS in the trust game

A Conceptual Framework for Integrating TPB With Context-Relevant Variables to Predict e-Learning Success During the Covid -19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated the digitalization of some aspects of our lives including education. However, as we witness a phenomenal rise in the demand for online learning, the decision to migrate to online learning platforms is dependent on the learner’s preparedness to embrace it. The objective of this study is to conceptualize a framework that measures the tendency of learners to adopt online learning in an era characterised by so many disruptions. To do this, we adopt document analysis on databases such as SCOPUS, Web of Science, EBSCO and Google Scholar using Boolean search engines; AND, OR, NOT, *, (), ‘’’’, +, -, <,>. mainly on current scientific manuscripts through the use of the keywords “e-learning”, “theory of planned behaviour”, “Covid 19”, “distance learning”, “environmental factors” and “academic technology adoption”. Subsequently, we integrate the theory of planned behaviour with other context-relevant variables as the bases of the study, and conceptualise a framework to predict e-learning success in the covid-19 era. This study contributes to the scientific body of knowledge on e-learning, particularly from the perspective of a forced mass adoption of e-learning occasioned by a global pandemic

A Conceptual Framework for Integrating TPB With Context-Relevant Variables to Predict e-Learning Success During the Covid -19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated the digitalization of some aspects of our lives including education. However, as we witness a phenomenal rise in the demand for online learning, the decision to migrate to online learning platforms is dependent on the learner’s preparedness to embrace it. The objective of this study is to conceptualize a framework that measures the tendency of learners to adopt online learning in an era characterised by so many disruptions. To do this, we adopt document analysis on databases such as SCOPUS, Web of Science, EBSCO and Google Scholar using Boolean search engines; AND, OR, NOT, *, (), ‘’’’, +, -, &lt;,&gt;. mainly on current scientific manuscripts through the use of the keywords “e-learning”, “theory of planned behaviour”, “Covid 19”, “distance learning”, “environmental factors” and “academic technology adoption”. Subsequently, we integrate the theory of planned behaviour with other context-relevant variables as the bases of the study, and conceptualise a framework to predict e-learning success in the covid-19 era. This study contributes to the scientific body of knowledge on e-learning, particularly from the perspective of a forced mass adoption of e-learning occasioned by a global pandemic.</p

A Conceptual Framework for Integrating TPB With Context-Relevant Variables to Predict e-Learning Success During the Covid -19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated the digitalization of some aspects of our lives including education. However, as we witness a phenomenal rise in the demand for online learning, the decision to migrate to online learning platforms is dependent on the learner’s preparedness to embrace it. The objective of this study is to conceptualize a framework that measures the tendency of learners to adopt online learning in an era characterised by so many disruptions. To do this, we adopt document analysis on databases such as SCOPUS, Web of Science, EBSCO and Google Scholar using Boolean search engines; AND, OR, NOT, *, (), ‘’’’, +, -, &lt;,&gt;. mainly on current scientific manuscripts through the use of the keywords “e-learning”, “theory of planned behaviour”, “Covid 19”, “distance learning”, “environmental factors” and “academic technology adoption”. Subsequently, we integrate the theory of planned behaviour with other context-relevant variables as the bases of the study, and conceptualise a framework to predict e-learning success in the covid-19 era. This study contributes to the scientific body of knowledge on e-learning, particularly from the perspective of a forced mass adoption of e-learning occasioned by a global pandemic

Trusting fast and slow : a consulting model for businesses seeking to increase consumer trust, based on evidence of dual cognitive processes in consumer trust judgements and the adaptation of risk-based trust measurement to a consumer context

Businesses need consumers to trust that their products and services will live up to expectations and trust their corporate claims to, for example, protect customer data or act sustainably. A rich literature in economics, marketing, management and behavioural science offers models of trust-building and potential interventions, but little practitioner guidance on how businesses should build trust in different situations. Moreover, ways of measuring trust differ across the literature: interpersonal trust research uses risky games to measure trust, but research with consumers relies on risk-free surveys. In Study 1 a novel risk-based measure of consumer trust is developed and used by 2,042 UK consumers to measure trust in nine companies across three sectors. For eight of these companies, the new measure leads to different conclusions than those reached using a standard measure. Trust correlates strongly with positive affect on the standard measure, but not on the risk-based one. A theoretical framework based on a dual process model of cognition explains why this correlation should change for the two different measures. It predicts that a relevant but complicated reason to trust a business, its highly competitive environment, will increase the risk-based measure of trust, but not on the standard measure. It also predicts that an irrelevant reason to trust a business, its simplicity, will do the opposite. In Study 2, pre-registered hypotheses in line with this proposal are largely supported in an experiment involving 1,762 UK consumers. Based on these findings, a consulting model is proposed which advises businesses to consider the cognitive process that consumers use when they form trust judgements. While specific contexts vary, this model advises that when consumers are using fast processes businesses should focus on heuristic trust-building interventions, while, when consumers are using slower processes, businesses can deploy more complex and nuanced evidence of their trustworthiness