Nonverbal content and trust: An experiment on digital communication

Abstract

We experimentally study the effect of the mode of digital communication on the emergence of trust in a principal-agent relationship. We consider three modes of communication that differ in the capacity to transmit nonverbal content: plain text, audio, and video. Communication is pre-play, one-way, and unrestricted, but its verbal content is homogenized across treatments. Overall, both audio and video messages have a positive (and similar) effect on trust as compared to plain text; however, the magnitude of these effects depends on the verbal content of agent's message (promise to act trustworthily vs. no such promise). In all conditions, we observe a positive effect of the agent's promise on the principal's trust. We also report that trust in female principals is sensitive to the availability of nonverbal cues about their partners.

Predicting Trustworthiness Across Cultures: An Experiment

“…For implementing the prediction task, we exploit the dataset previously reported in Babutsidze et al (2021). That study is based on the hidden action game by Charness and Dufwenberg (2006) presented in Figure 1.…”

“…The original database in Babutsidze et al (2021) includes 41 trustees and has been collected at Laboratoire d'Economie Expérimentale de Nice (LEEN) of the University of Nice, France. These participants gave their explicit consent (i) for being recorded, and (ii) for those recordings being used for strictly scientific purposes in related experimental studies.…”

“…A well-established finding is that making a voluntary promise (i.e., a free statement of intent) to cooperate is predictive of the sender's cooperative behavior (see Woike and Kanngiesser, 2019, for a recent and exhaustive review of this vast literature). In addition, Babutsidze et al (2021) provide experimental evidence that this signal is correctly taken into account by the receivers across several communication protocols (ranging from plain text transcript to audio recording to video recording to face-to-face interaction) varying the amount of nonverbal content conveyed in the sender's message.…”

“…Our laboratory experiment is based on a variation of the trust game (Berg et al, 1995) with moral hazard, known as the hiddenaction game (Charness and Dufwenberg, 2006). Our first set of stimuli comes from the previous experimental dataset reported by Babutsidze et al (2021). It consists of video recordings of short, free-form pre-play statements delivered by the trustees to the trustors in direct face-to-face interactions happening in Nice, France.…”

“…We find several consistent patterns of prediction-making in our two samples. For both samples, the overall rates of accurate 1 These two sets of stimuli come from our previous experimental work reported in Zylbersztejn et al (2020) and Babutsidze et al (2021). 2 For a similar approach based on non-experimental data see, e.g., Belot et al (2010Belot et al ( , 2012, Sylwester et al (2012), Van den Assem et al (2012), Turmunkh et al (2019).…”