Towards Machines that Trust: AI Agents Learn to Trust in the Trust Game

Abstract: Widely considered a cornerstone of human morality, trust shapes many aspects of human social interactions. In this work, we present a theoretical analysis of the $\textit{trust game}$, the canonical task for studying trust in behavioral and brain sciences, along with simulation results supporting our analysis. Specifically, leveraging reinforcement learning (RL) to train our AI agents, we systematically investigate learning trust under various parameterizations of this task. Our theoretical analysis, corroborated by the simulations results presented, provides a mathematical basis for the emergence of trust in the trust game.