Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences | 2017 Media Naturalness and the Ability to Predict Generosity in a Give-Some – Get-Some Interaction1 Roderick E. White Derrick J. Neufeld Mahdi Roghanizad Western University Western University University of Waterloo
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract to greatly facilitate exchange by reducing transaction costs, thus enhancing the performance of both organizations and markets. Although the origin and role Evolutionary psychologists believe the human mind of generosity, cooperation, sharing and trust is a widely evolved to solve adaptive problems present in our studied and much debated topic [8,25,42,45], ancestral environment. Our hominid ancestors survived researchers generally agree that the ability to reliably in face-to-face groups by assessing the cooperative detect, ex post, how partners have behaved is essential intentions of other group members. Media naturalness for cooperation to have evolved [13,39,40,31]. theory postulates face-to-face is the most ‘natural’ Establishing exchange relationships with novel partners communication medium. This paper reports results from can be highly advantageous, but the absence of prior a laboratory experiment examining the ability of student experience with, or reputational information about these subjects to predict the generosity of a counter-party partners also makes these relationships especially risky. under two media conditions: Face-to-Face (FtF), the The risk is that the prospective partner will not be more natural condition; and Video-to-Video (VtV), the cooperative, and will act opportunistically to their own less natural, technology-mediated condition. After a advantage.