Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Widely considered a cornerstone of human morality, trust shapes many aspects of human social interactions. In this work, we show that artificial intelligence (AI) agents learn to trust ― and rationally adapt the extent to which they trust ― by interacting with their counterparts in the trust game (Berg, Dickhaut, & McCabe, 1995), the canonical task for studying trust in behavioral and brain sciences. Leveraging reinforcement learning (RL) to train our AI agents, we systematically investigate learning trust under various parameterizations of this task and show that trust can arise from pure self interest. Our work sheds new light on the computational underpinnings of trust, taking us a step closer to developing AI agents whose values are aligned with human values.