The Collective Trust Game: An Online Group Adaptation of the Trust Game Based on the HoneyComb Paradigm

The Collective Trust Game is an online multi-agent adaptation of the trust game. in the Honeycomb paradigm. It allows researchers to investigate collective trust and its emergence in groups holistically.

This game combines the high internal validity of an economic game with rich spatial temporal data so that emergent group processes can be investigated in detail. It is important to prohibit for the participants from sharing their screen, camera, microphone, and the chat between participants to ensure complete anonymity between participants. As long as the remote desktop is set up correctly and the experimenter and the participants have a stable internet connection, there should be no problem in running this experiment.

To begin, start a remote desktop connection with the experimenter user. Open the shared folder and start a terminal by right clicking in the directory and choosing Open Terminal here. Then start the server program by typing the command in the terminal and pressing Enter.

Next, establish a remote desktop connection with participant users. Open the shared folder and start a terminal in this folder as before. Start the client programs for each participant user by typing the command in the terminal and pressing Enter.

Check that a line appears in the server GUI displaying the IP address of each of the participant users. Check whether the connections are established correctly for all participant users. When all participant users are connected, click on OK.Check that the screens of the participant users display the welcome screen of the experiment.

Admit all participants to the video conference at the scheduled experiment time slot and send each participant their individual login data. Guide participants to open the remote desktop connection tool. Assign participants to one of the investor or trustee roles.

Have investors start on the bottommost field and trustees on the upmost field. Instruct participants to move their avatar by left clicking into an adjacent hexagon field. Instruct participants that their avatar will display a small tail for 4, 000 milliseconds after each move that indicates the last direction from which they moved to the current field.

Allow investors to move from the beginning to indicate through movement how much they would like to invest. After a certain amount of time, prohibit the movement of investors. Explain in the instructions that the invested amount is multiplied by a factor and sent to the trustees.

Restrict the trustees from moving for as long as the investors are moving by setting the trustee time-in to the length of the trustee time-out. Instruct the trustees to move to indicate the fraction they would like to return to the investors. Once the trustee time-out is reached, the field on which the trustees stand is taken to indicate the fraction that is returned to the investors.

The amount returned is indicated in the middle of the play field by a yellow number. Have the pop-up window display the amount of money the person has earned at the end of the round. Repeat the game round as needed.

Once all rounds are complete, ask participants to generate a personal unique code so that the in-game earnings can be connected to their name while keeping the behavioral data anonymous. After participants have generated the code, display a screen which instructs participants to return to the video conference and close the remote desktop connection. Once the game is completed, make sure that all participants have closed the remote desktop connection.

Have the participants fill out questionnaires as seen fit for a specific research question. While the participants are filling out the questionnaires, close the server program on the experimenter user by clicking on Stop and Exit. This will also close the program on the participant users.

Transfer and back up the data in the form of csv and txt files per group and experiment time slot marked by a day and timestamp of the experiment. Close all remote desktop connections. In a pilot sample, participants reported the game to be quite intuitive and a 30 second time-out to be about right.

Based on responses to open-ended questions of the pilot sample, participants were satisfied with the recruitment process and online procedure, preservation of anonymity in the experiment, and clarity of instructions and information provided, and the logic of the game. Most participants were satisfied with the design of the avatars, even though only half of those reported feelings sufficiently represented by their avatar. Participants reported behavioral strategies such as profit maximization or intentions to influence the behavior of coplayers.

These strategies fit well with the economic game character of the Collective Trust Game. With a Collective Trust Game, trust and fairness behavior can be investigated as well as the processes that promote or impede their emergence.