Disentangling trust from cooperation: Evolution of trust as reduced monitoring in social dilemmas

Citation

Perret C, Han TA, Fernández Domingos E, Cimpeanu T & Powers ST (2026) Disentangling trust from cooperation: Evolution of trust as reduced monitoring in social dilemmas. Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 208, p. 118130. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chaos.2026.118130

Abstract
It is commonly assumed that trust increases cooperation. However, game-theoretic models often fail to distinguish between cooperative actions and trust, making it difficult to independently measure trust and determine how its effects vary in different social dilemmas. To address this, we build on influential theories that equate trust with reduced monitoring of an agent’s actions. We implement this as a heuristic that cognitively bounded agents can use in repeated games to avoid spending time and effort always monitoring their partner. Agents using this heuristic reduce monitoring of a partner’s actions once a threshold level of cooperativeness has been observed — providing a measurable and architecture-agnostic definition of trust. Using evolutionary game theory, we systematically analyse the success of strategies that use this trust heuristic across the entire space of two-player symmetric social dilemma games. We demonstrate that trust-as-reduced-monitoring facilitates cooperation in two different ways. First, when monitoring is costly, trust heuristics allow for higher levels of cooperation in social dilemmas where the temptation to defect is high. Second, when agents can make action errors, trust heuristics promote cooperation even in coordination problems. Our results disentangle trust from cooperation, and provide a behavioural measure of trust that applies across interaction types.

Keywords
Trust; Cooperation; Costly monitoring; Social dilemmas; Evolutionary game theory

Journal
Chaos, Solitons & Fractals: Volume 208

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