Building trust during participatory modeling process: what gamification can offer?

Trust is one of the core factors contributing to effective initial communication between the stakeholders and to the ability of a group to deal with internal conflicts in the long term. Generally, trust is predetermined by three factors: propensity to trust, perceived trustworthiness, and trust behaviors. In the participatory modeling (PM) little could be done about the propensity to trust of the stakeholders - we cannot select the participants based on this criterion and we work with what we have got. At the same time, perceived trustworthiness and trust behaviors seem to be the leverage points which we can affect during the PM process. Gamification of the PM process requires consideration of such aspects as: (1) Context: trust is built at the initial stages of PM and it predetermines the success of the next stages. The initial level of trust can vary from negative to neutral; (2) Objectives: promote trust behaviors in the group and allow the participants to evaluate behavior of each other under different conditions to increase perceived trustworthiness; (3) Participants’ characteristics & targeted behavior: we divide the stakeholders into two groups - powerful group (opportunism, high level of control, etc.) and vulnerable group (reluctance to speak, conformity, etc.); (4) Game design: considering the above mentioned we propose a set of strategies. E.g. one of the strategies could be about Roles & Narratives when the ‘powerful group’ is given a task to behave from the perspective of ‘vulnerable group’ and they both need to respond to a range of cases/stories in a partly anonymous setting. Through this process, the participants learn more about the reasoning behind the behavior of each other. Therefore, it could influence perceived trustworthiness. We are developing a toolbox of such strategies and methods to use at various stages of the PM process.