Watching, being watched, and human interactions: evidence from trust games

Face-to-face communication increases human trust, which is crucial for making important decisions with others. Due to technological breakthroughs and the COVID-19 pandemic, human interactions now predominantly occur online, leading to two situations: other peoples’ faces cannot be seen, but yours can, and vice versa. However, the relationships among watching, being watched, and face-to-face interaction are unclear in existing papers. This paper separately measures the effects of both watching and being watched on human interactions using a trust game. I derive the optimal behaviors of senders and receivers in the trust game and empirically validate it through a controlled experiment. The results show that more than half of the participants perform the optimal behavior. They also indicate that both watching and being watched enhance human trust and reciprocity, while the synergy effect of face-to-face is not observed. Additionally, women reciprocate more when they are watched, and trust increases when participants are paired with the opposite gender and can watch their partner. This paper theoretically concludes that the former comes from women’s social pressure that they should be reciprocators, and the latter from participants’ beliefs that the opposite gender reciprocates more than the same gender does. These results propose a framework based on watching and being watched affecting human behaviors and emphasize the importance of face-to-face communication in online human interactions.