Department of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London, London, United Kingdom.
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Group, Julius-Maximilians University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany.
PLoS One. 2023 Nov 28;18(11):e0294420. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0294420. eCollection 2023.
Trust is a key feature of social relationships. Common measures of trust, questionnaires and economic games, lack ecological validity. Hence, we sought to introduce an immersive, virtual reality (VR) measure for the behavioral assessment of trust across remote and in-person settings, building on the maze task of Hale et al. (2018). Our 'Wayfinding Task' consists of an interconnected urban environment for participants to navigate on the advice of two characters of differing trustworthiness. We present four studies implementing the Wayfinding Task in remote and in-person testing environments and comparing performance across head-mounted display (HMD)-based VR and desktop setups. In each study, the trustworthiness of two virtual characters was manipulated, through either a fact sheet providing trustworthiness information, or a behavior-based trustworthiness manipulation task termed the Door Game, based on Van der Biest et al., 2020. Participants then completed the Wayfinding Task. Overall, we found that participant behavior in the Wayfinding Task reflected the relative trustworthiness of the two characters; in particular, the trustworthy character was approached more often for advice, reflecting data from our Door Game. We found mostly null results for our novel outcome measure, interpersonal distance. Remote testing successfully achieved these effects. While HMD-based VR and desktop setups both showed these effects, there was a stronger effect of trustworthiness in the HMD VR version of the task. These results have implications for the measurement of trust in behavioral settings and the use of remote and VR-based testing in social experiments.
信任是社会关系的一个关键特征。常用的信任衡量标准，如问卷和经济游戏，缺乏生态有效性。因此，我们试图引入一种沉浸式的虚拟现实（VR）方法，用于在远程和现场环境中评估信任行为，这是基于 Hale 等人（2018）的迷宫任务。我们的“寻路任务”由一个相互连接的城市环境组成，参与者可以根据两个不同可信度的角色的建议在其中导航。我们提出了四项研究，在远程和现场测试环境中实施寻路任务，并比较了基于头戴式显示器（HMD）的 VR 和桌面设置的性能。在每项研究中，通过提供可信度信息的情况说明书或基于行为的可信度操纵任务（称为“门游戏”），操纵两个虚拟角色的可信度，该任务基于 Van der Biest 等人（2020）的研究。然后，参与者完成寻路任务。总体而言，我们发现参与者在寻路任务中的行为反映了两个角色的相对可信度；特别是，更常向可信赖的角色寻求建议，这反映了我们的门游戏数据。我们对新的人际距离结果测量得到的大多是无效结果。远程测试成功地实现了这些效果。虽然基于 HMD 的 VR 和桌面设置都显示了这些效果，但在任务的 HMD VR 版本中，可信度的效果更强。这些结果对行为环境中的信任测量以及在社会实验中使用远程和基于 VR 的测试具有影响。
