Who is AI? The Impact of Identity Labels in Multi-Round Trust Games

Liu Jiahui; Gu Ruolei; Wu Tingting; Luo Yi

doi:10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20250602

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Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2025, Vol. 48 ›› Issue (6) : 1294-1313. DOI: 10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20250602

Computational Modeling and Artificial Intelligence

Who is AI? The Impact of Identity Labels in Multi-Round Trust Games

Liu Jiahui¹, Gu Ruolei², Wu Tingting³, Luo Yi¹

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Abstract

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, intelligent agents are becoming increasingly prevalent in human life. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how identity labels influence human trust-based decision-making. Previous studies have revealed that there is a certain label effect on human trust. That is, even if all the participants are playing games with robots, when they are told that their partner is a robot, individuals cooperate less than when they are told that their partner is human(Ishowo-Oloko et al., 2019). In addition, the labels assigned to the participants themselves may also be one of the important factors influencing their trust.
The present study investigated how identity labels (human vs. AI) of investors and trustees influence human trust in a multi-round trust game (MRT) with computational modeling. This experiment was a behavioral study involving 84 investors (25 males, mean age 21.5 ± 2.5 years old) and 84 trustees (23 males, mean age 21.0 ± 2.0 years old). It employed a mixed design with 2 factors: 2 (Investor Label: Human vs. AI) × 2 (Trustee Label: Human vs. AI). But both investor and trustee are fixed human partners and they played 40 rounds MRT in 2 periods labeled as different labels, respectively. In each round of MRT, the investor (played by the real participant) received ¥20 and decided how much of it to send to the trustee (played by another real participant). The amount (a, ranging from 0 to 20) the investor sent was tripled and delivered to the trustee, who returned b (ranging from 0 to 3*a) back to the investor. The investor ended up with 20-a+b; the trustee with 3*a-b.
The results indicated that the investor’s investment amount increases as the trustee's return increases in the last round. As the interaction proceeds, the investor’s investment amount gradually increases. In addition, AI-labeled investors invested less to trustee, particularly interacting with human-labeled trustees. This suggests that the AI label reduces sensitivity to fairness norms and weakens impression management motives, as reflected in lower social preference parameters including envy and guilt in Fehr-Schmidt inequality aversion model (FS model). While investors generally invested more when they received higher returns from trustees in the last round, AI-labeled investors showed more random decision-making patterns (evidenced by elevated inverse temperature parameters in the Rescorla-Wagner model) specifically when interacting with human-labeled trustees. And learning rates did not differ across identity labels, indicating that the differences stem from decision-making strategies rather than learning efficiency. These results suggest that the effect of AI label on investors’ trust occurs through dual paths. One path is the weakening of motivation for impression management and sensitivity to static social norms and the reduction of the active pursuit of fair results. The other path is the decline in the utilization rate of dynamic learning strategies. When facing human, AI label reduce the investor’s adjustments based on historical feedback (the application of dynamic learning strategies decreases), and the behavior becomes more random.
For trustees, the repayment increases as the investor's investment and decreases as the interaction proceeds. Trustee returned more money to the human-labeled investor than to the AI-labeled investor. The AI-labeled trustee exhibited higher repayment and stronger guilt, suggesting they internalized a "service obligation" stereotype. Then interacting with AI-labeled investors, this trend becomes stronger indicating that human-labeled trustee showed less trust expectation for AI-labeled investor and less concern on social evaluation from the AI labeled investor. Meanwhile, the dynamic behavior of trustees primarily exhibits a dominant influence pattern driven by current investment amounts, with minimal impact from cumulative experience. Furthermore, this influence pattern becomes more pronounced for trustees with an AI-label, suggesting that the AI label further reinforces such myopic and immediate decision-making patterns.
These findings suggest that identity labels have a significant impact on individuals' trust decisions and are role-specific and context-specific. AI labels change individuals' decision-making patterns by weakening social norms (investors) or strengthening service obligations (trustees) and this indicates that AI label influence trust through dual paths of impression management mechanisms (altering social supervision expectations) and stereotype activation (internalizing behavioral characteristics of AI). This mechanism reveals the dynamic construction process of identity cognition, breaks through the traditional linear understanding of AI labels, and demonstrates its complex cognitive mechanism in social interaction - not only a passive trust intermediary, but also a dynamic cognitive switch that can actively reshape the boundaries of trust and cooperation, providing a new theoretical perspective for understanding the embedding process of artificial intelligence in social systems.

Key words

trust / label effect / social norm / impression management / stereotype

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Liu Jiahui, Gu Ruolei, Wu Tingting, Luo Yi. Who is AI? The Impact of Identity Labels in Multi-Round Trust Games[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2025, 48(6): 1294-1313 https://doi.org/10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20250602

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