Trust and Cognitive Load in the Text-Chat Environment

Over the last decade, text messages have become one of most popular forms of communication. A diverse array of software to enable the exchange of text messages has been developed and deployed on computers and smart phones which is one of reasons for the increased use of text messages for communication purposes. However, there are several disadvantages for communicators when using text messages. For example, in the text-chat environment, there is a lack of trust between communicators (Bos et al., 2002) and communicators may face a high cognitive load (Thirunarayanan et al., 2002). Therefore, we conducted several studies to improve communication between people in the text-chat environment where important elements for communication, such as facial expressions, do not exist. We examined various data collected from people with different levels of interpersonal trust and cognitive load, including chat contents (e.g., the number of assent words used), mouse movements (e.g., distance travelled by the mouse) and physiological signals (skin response). These data proved to be useful indicators for measuring the level of trust of the communicators and the cognitive load to which the communicators were exposed. These findings have implications for enhancing the communication and relationships between communicators in a text-chat environment and will assist system developers to design applications to measure the conditions the communicators are under when they use the text-chat environment to complete tasks in a business or government context and provide them with suitable assistance.In addition to using the previously mentioned data to measure trust and cognitive load, we further examined the text-chat environment by allowing communicators to see the actions of their partners in real time when they were trying to solve tasks. Our results show that when communicators are able to see the behaviors of their partners when they chat in the text-chat environment while completing tasks, it improves the level of interpersonal trust between them. Finally, in this thesis, we examined the effects of cooperation and cognitive load on interpersonal trust. The findings show that trust is significantly improved between communicators in the text-chat environment when the communicators act in a cooperative way and when they are under a low cognitive load