The Cost of Appearing Suspicious? Information Gathering in Trust Decisions

Abstract

Trust decisions are inherently uncertain, as people have incomplete information about the trustworthiness of the other prior to their decision. Therefore, it is beneficial to gather information about a trustee's past behaviour before deciding whether or not to trust them. However, elaborate inquiries about a trustee's behavior may change the trustee's willingness to reciprocate, causing either a decrease due to the investor appearing suspicious, or an increase because the investor appears to be highly betrayal-averse. Such a change could cause the investor to gather less or more information, respectively. We examine how information acquisition is modulated by social context, monetary cost, and the trustee's trustworthiness. Participants had the opportunity to sequentially sample information about a trustee's reciprocation history before they decided whether or not to invest. On some trials, we induced a social context by telling the participant that the trustee would later learn how much the participant sampled ("overt sampling"). Participants sampled less when there was a monetary cost and when the reciprocation history was more conclusive. Crucially, when sampling was free and overt, participants sampled less, suggesting negative consequences of appearing suspicious. In post-experiment questionnaires, participants indeed reported a belief that the reciprocation probability would decrease when information was overtly sampled. The findings replicated in a second experiment and were well accounted for by a utility-maximizing model in which overt sampling induces a decrease in reciprocation probability.This study opens the door to broader applications of the tools and models of information sampling to social decision-making.

Children perform extensive information gathering when it is not costly

“…In recent years, cognitive neuroscience has started to reveal the mechanisms underlying information gathering and how healthy adults solve this challenge. A key finding is that humans dynamically adjust their decision criteria depending on how long they have been sampling, and not necessarily based on explicit objective sampling costs ( Bogacz, Wagenmakers, Forstmann, & Nieuwenhuis, 2010 ; Gesiarz, Cahill, & Sharot, 2019 ; Hauser, Moutoussis, Iannaccone, et al, 2017 ; Ma, Sanfey, & Ma, 2019 ; Malhotra, Leslie, Ludwig, & Bogacz, 2017 ; Thura, Cos, Trung, & Cisek, 2014 ). This behaviour is evidence for subjective sampling costs that increase as more information is gathered, rendering a long information sampling process unattractive.…”

The Cognitive Mechanisms That Drive Social Belief Updates During Adolescence

“…These mechanisms are internal and not directly observable but can be exposed using active sequential information sampling and computational modelling. To this end, we used the Information Sampling Trust Game and computational models 21 in an adolescent sample with a wide age range (10-24 years). These findings shed light on the cognitive mechanisms that drive social belief updates during adolescence.…”

Look up what you cannot solve in your mind! Children increase information gathering to counteract imprecise planning abilities

“…In recent years, cognitive neuroscience has started to reveal the mechanisms underlying information gathering and how healthy adults solve this challenge. A key finding is that humans use planning based on their current knowledge to determine the extent they engage in gathering information before making a decision (FitzGerald et al, 2014;Hauser, Moutoussis, Iannaccone, et al, 2017;Ma et al, 2019;Moutoussis et al, 2011), and that this process is flexible, adapting to the current demands (such as explicit costs for information gathering) to reach near optimal performance (Bogacz, Hu, et al, 2010;Hauser, Moutoussis, Iannaccone, et al, 2017). Moreover, a consistent finding across multiple approaches and tasks is that humans dynamically adjust their criteria for stopping the information gathering process, depending on how long they already have been sampling (Bogacz, Wagenmakers, et al, 2010;Gesiarz et al, 2019;Hauser, Moutoussis, Iannaccone, et al, 2017;Ma et al, 2019;Malhotra et al, 2017;.…”