How Human Trusters Assess Trustworthiness in Quasi-virtual Contexts

A virtual encounter is one in which an agent has only symbolic information about her coactors. In a quasi-virtual one she has a smidgeon of non-symbolic, sensory information. Internet encounters are virtual; and quasi-virtual ones are normal in laboratory experiments. In these experiments we want to limit the information the decision maker gets in order to have control (if you let people meet there’s much too much going on to tell afterwards what drove the behavior). But it is hard to achieve complete virtuality because people see the tops of each other’s heads and have other fleeting sensory contact. Sometimes we want the smidgeon because it ‘engages’ the subject’s human reactions, and these may be the object of study.