UC Davis

Coordination among teams or pairs is vital to completing cooperative problem-solving tasks. Moreover, trust among team members enhances performance in cooperative settings, but how coordination and trust relate to each other among partners who have no past history together is uncertain. Therefore, this study tested the relationship between coordination performance (accuracy and completion time) and levels of trust (cognitive and affective) in an augmented reality tangram matching task. Pairs of young adult participants (N = 104) entered a laboratory to play a game wherein “directors” described target shapes to “matchers” who attempted to match targets in a smartphone-displayed grid. Participants answered trust surveys after each of three game rounds. The effects of task-role on self and partners’ trust perceptions were explored using an actor-partner interaction model. Cognitive trust was positively associated with accuracy but not completion time, implying the relevance of cognitive trust on coordination task performance among zero-history dyads. Furthermore, directors’ cognitive trust towards partners influenced matchers’ change in cognitive trust toward directors, but not vice versa. This suggests that differences between task-roles may lead to reciprocated trust from one, but not both, partners in a dyad. The study discussed communication behaviors related to different levels of trust, the grounding process, and incongruencies between task-roles, as to propose future research avenues.