A journal paper review
Effects of four computer-mediated communications channels on trust development Bos et al. (2002)
I was fascinated by this paper for lots of reasons. But first I will summarise the paper.
Very Brief Summary
This paper describes an ‘experiment’ to investigate how four channels of communication affect the development of trust in a group based trading game. This allowed the level of trust achieved within a group to be quantified. Teams then communicated using text chat, face to face communication, video conferencing or audio conferencing tools. The authors found that trust was best in F2F settings, but that video and audio were next, and both better that text only chat. Trust developed in video and audio settings were more fragile that trust developed face to face (F2F).
Reasons I thought it was interesting:
Firstly because it decribed itself as an experiment, rather than a quasi-experiment. Also (I think) because in using statistics in the way it did, it made the assumption that all the variables were controlled, other than those being manipulated. This, of course, isn’t the case.
Secondly because it used a very narrow definition of trust. In social dilemma games the best outcome for individuals does not result in the best outcome for the group, but this may not be the case in other contexts. Sometimes a level of distrust may be beneficial. Is there a correlation between levels of trust and successful collaboration in learning situations?
Thirdly because it extrapolated (extended the use of the findings beyond the investigated situation) to real world situations, when the quasi-experimental set up that it used is very highly contrived (a very particular design trying to emulate an experiment, but in effect failing to do so because it failed to acknowledge fully the complexity of the situation). The researchers acknlowledge that one limitation was using students, so the findings are unlikely to apply in a work/professional setting.
Additionally, this provides a good example of tool use in activity theory. The outcome is influenced by the tool used to play the game. We can also see that each tool develops a different kind of community with different rules about trust. Just a thought.