Fitzhugh Sean M, Maupin Cynthia K, DeCostanza Arwen H
Humans in Complex Systems Division, DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory, Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD, 21005, USA.
Department of Management, University of Mississippi, University, MS, 38677, USA.
Cogn Res Princ Implic. 2025 Sep 19;10(1):61. doi: 10.1186/s41235-025-00662-1.
Trust serves an important purpose in organizations composed of numerous, specialized, interdependent roles. Supporting confidence that individuals will dutifully fulfill the responsibilities of those roles without causing harm to the organization, trust enables coordinated task execution across multiple roles and facilitates information exchange among individuals by reducing cognitive resources spent verifying information accuracy and reliability. Interactions play an important role in shaping and updating trust, but the mechanisms underlying the relationship between communication networks and trust dynamics remain poorly understood. This paper addresses that gap by directly examining the coevolution of communication networks and trust. During a multi-day military training exercise, participants (n=83) from three distinct units formed a coalition organization largely focused on collecting, analyzing, and acting on information gleaned from the operating environment of roughly 10k units under their command. Over the course of the exercise, each participant provided eight ratings of trust in their own unit and their coalition partners' units. Static and dynamic network models of the organization's communication networks assessed whether trust is an antecedent or product of communication. Results consistently show that when individuals report elevated trust in a unit, they become more likely to form and sustain relationships to members of that unit during the next time period. They also increase their rates of communication to those unit members. However, this relationship does not work in reverse: Increased communication to a unit does not precede increased trust in that unit. These findings suggest temporal directionality in the coevolution of trust and communication.
在由众多专业化、相互依存的角色组成的组织中，信任起着重要作用。信任能让人相信个体将尽职履行这些角色的职责而不会对组织造成损害，从而使跨多个角色的协调任务执行成为可能，并通过减少用于核实信息准确性和可靠性所花费的认知资源，促进个体之间的信息交流。互动在塑造和更新信任方面发挥着重要作用，但通信网络与信任动态之间关系的潜在机制仍知之甚少。本文通过直接研究通信网络与信任的共同演化来填补这一空白。在为期多天的军事训练演习中，来自三个不同单位的83名参与者组成了一个联合组织，该组织主要专注于收集、分析从其指挥下约1万个单位的作战环境中获取的信息并据此采取行动。在演习过程中，每位参与者对自己所在单位以及联合伙伴单位给出了八项信任评级。对该组织通信网络的静态和动态网络模型进行评估，以确定信任是通信的前提还是产物。结果始终表明，当个体报告对某个单位的信任度提高时，他们在接下来的时间段内更有可能与该单位的成员建立并维持关系。他们与这些单位成员的通信频率也会增加。然而，这种关系并非反向成立：与某个单位通信增加并不会先于对该单位信任度的提高。这些发现表明了信任与通信共同演化中的时间方向性。
