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Jan 16, 2005

Computer mediated communicatios effects

This research is about team trust development.

When virtual teams need to establish trust at a distance, it is advantageous for them to use rich media to communicate.

A Universitu of Michigan research team 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).

Computer-Mediated Communications may delay trust formation by slowing the rate at which individuals can gather nonverbal cues about partners’ trustworthiness.

See more on the paper->