# Breaking Trust Barriers: Humans vs. Bots in Online Communities 😱🤖👥
1. **Humans and bots behave differently in online communities, affecting the establishment of trust.** Psychological experiments showed that trust gained through sharing and punishment was less pronounced when interacting with bots compared to humans. People carried assumptions about social norms from human societies into mixed human-bot communities.
2. **Increasing awareness of social norms can enhance trust and cooperation with bots.** When participants were informed about the high consensus regarding sharing, trust gains generally increased. Shifting social norms can expand the circle of trust to include nonhuman bots, suggesting a better approach than making bots appear more human-like.
3. **Stylized societies provide insights into human cooperation, but real-world interactions with bots remain unexplored.** The study’s experimental setup captured human-bot collectives in a controlled environment. However, it remains to be seen how people will behave when facing bots outside of the lab.
## Supplemental Information ℹ️
This study highlights the unique dynamics of trust in human-machine collectives, shedding light on the challenges faced in mixed online communities. It suggests that while humans do exhibit some trust and cooperative behavior towards bots, it is not on the same level as interactions with fellow humans. The findings emphasize the importance of understanding social norms and shaping perceptions to establish trust in human-bot interactions.
### ELI5 💁
People trust and treat bots differently than they do other humans online. This study found that sharing and punishing behavior didn’t lead to the same level of trust when interacting with bots. However, if people are made aware of how most others think it’s good to cooperate with bots, trust can increase. This research helps us understand how humans and bots interact online, but we still need to learn more about how people behave with bots in the real world.