When virtual teams need to establish trust at a distance, it is advantageous for them to use rich media to communicate. We studied the emergence of trust in a social dilemma game in four different communication situations: face-to-face, video, audio, and text chat. All three of the richer conditions were significant improvements over text chat. Video and audio conferencing groups were nearly as good as face-toface, but both did show some evidence of what we term delayed trust (slower progress toward full cooperation) and fragile trust (vulnerability to opportunistic behavior). Keywords Trust, social dilemmas, communication, media Long-distance collaboration is a fact of life for an increasing number of workers. More relationships are being formed and maintained online than ever before, including supplierpurchaser relationships, student-teacher relationships, and even collaboration between employees of the same company [7]. These distant collaborators have an increasingly varied set of...
Nathan Bos, Judith S. Olson, Darren Gergle, Gary M