DHB Collaborative Research: Dynamics of Initial Trust and Cooperation: The Role of Embodied Emotion Cues

这个项目研究了一个社会和经济互动的基本问题：个人能否准确地评估陌生人的可信度，如果可以，通过什么机制？信任的决定是发展稳定的伙伴关系和社会的必要因素。然而，面对延迟交流带来的诸多好处，信任他人的决定往往是不稳定的。首先付出努力或提供资源的人必然处于不值得羡慕的境地，因为他可能会冒着对方不会回报的风险。因此，适应性功能不仅依赖于信任他人，还依赖于决定伴侣是否值得信任的能力。然而，有趣的是，以前旨在揭示可信度信号的努力相对不成功。项目小组成员的初步研究表明，新伙伴的可信度可以在大于机会的水平上被发现，目前的项目探索了一种新的途径，个人可以通过这种途径评估潜在伙伴的意图。与其孤立地寻找可信度的具体线索，评估信任的过程将被重新概念化为一个动态和迭代的过程。简而言之，该项目将研究信任的决定是否不是简单地基于阅读他人的暗示，而是基于一种动态的“舞蹈”，即合作伙伴参与无意识的模仿，并且在这样做的过程中，能够利用自己的身体状态来推断他们的伴侣的感受，从而预测他们的动机。为了研究这种可能性，研究小组将进行实验，研究在行为经济游戏的背景下，发出的非语言信号和模仿对信任决策的相互作用。此外，鉴于这些现象的许多方面往往发生在人类意识和控制之外，新开发的社交机器人将在几个实验中用作人类的互动伙伴。这些机器人不仅提供了严格的控制相关的表达参数，这是不可能在人类，但也有机会测试提出的模型，允许机器人预测人类合作伙伴的可信度。总的来说，这个项目不仅有可能增加对基于信任的关系最初出现的基础过程的理解，而且还可以改进物理和计算架构，使机器人能够推断动机和预测人类的行动，从而增加它们作为交互伙伴的效用和价值。

This project investigates a question fundamental to social and economic interactions: Can individuals accurately assess the trustworthiness of unfamiliar others and, if so, through what mechanisms? Decisions to trust constitute a necessary element for the development of stable partnerships and societies. Yet, in the face of the many benefits that come with delayed exchanges, the decision to trust another is often a precarious one. The individual who first extends effort or provides resources is necessarily in the unenviable position of risking that the other will not reciprocate. Consequently, adaptive functioning relies not only on trusting others, but also on the ability to decide if one's partner is worthy of trust. Interestingly, however, previous efforts designed to uncover the signals of trustworthiness have been relatively unsuccessful. Building off initial research by members of the project team which demonstrates that trustworthiness of new partners can be discerned at greater than chance levels, the current project explores a novel route by which individuals may assesses the intentions of potential partners. Rather than looking for specific cues to trustworthiness in isolation, the process of assessing trust will be reconceptualized as a dynamic and iterative one. In short, the project will examine whether decisions to trust are not based simply on reading the cues of others, but rather on a dynamic "dance" whereby partners engage in nonconscious mimicry, and in so doing, are able to use perceptions of their own bodily states to infer their partner's feelings and, thereby, predict their motivations. To investigate this possibility, the research team will conduct experiments examining the interplay of emitted nonverbal signals and mimicry on decisions to trust within the context of behavioral economic games. Moreover, given that many facets of these phenomena often occur outside of human awareness and control, newly developed social robots will be used as interaction partners for humans in several experiments. These robots provide not only exacting control over relevant expressive parameters that is not possible in humans, but also the opportunity to test proposed models by allowing the robot to predict the trustworthiness of human partners. Taken as a whole, this project not only holds potential to increase understanding of the processes the underlie the initial emergence of trust-based relationships, but also to refine the physical and computational architecture that enable robots to infer motives and predict actions of humans and, thereby, increase their utility and value as interaction partners.