Caretaker: A Social Game for Studying Trust Dynamics

We present a new strategy for studying trust determination, especially in the context of dynamic trust. We created a game in which the players start with neutral trust for each other, have assigned roles ("good\´\´ or "bad\´\´) and an incentive to deduce the roles of the other players, and are encouraged to take part in social and economic interactions with each other, thereby gathering data with which to make trust determinations. By running user tests, we show that a game with these components generates useful data with which the players\´ decisions regarding trust for each other can be observed and better understood. We show that players are more likely to increase their self-reported trust for each other after engaging in an economic transaction, and, surprisingly, their trust for each other increases by a larger margin when the transaction was asymmetric. We also present an analysis of the chat that the players participated in, via an in-game chat system. We show that the two most popular topics of discussion are trade requests and game administration, and suggest possible future work in comparing the players\´ chat actions to their trust for each other.