Video Games and Trust in Real Life Travel Decisions
- Justin Matheson
- Mar 27
- 5 min read
Trust is such a vibe.
Culture deck. Values poster. Maybe a workshop where everyone agrees to assume positive intent.
Then someone makes one questionable decision on a Tuesday, and the whole thing collapses like my old camping chair. Obviously they didn’t do enough trust falls.
On the topic of trust, this research article came across my inbox about how video games develop trust in real-world destinations.
Video games!
A 2025 study in Administrative Sciences argues that when a game makes a real-world destination feel credible and trustworthy, that trust can carry over into real travel willingness. (Administrative Sciences, 2025)
That is not just a tourism curiosity. It is a clean little model of something L&D cares about constantly.
How do you build trust in something people have not experienced yet, and how does that trust survive first contact with reality?
The research in plain language
Ben Arbia, Bouzaabia, and Beck studied gamers who play titles set in real-world environments, and looked at how in-game experiences shape willingness to visit those places in real life. Their model frames this as “transfer trust,” meaning trust formed virtually can transfer to real-world intent. (Administrative Sciences, 2025)
If you strip away the tourism framing, the moving parts are familiar:
Immersion and enjoyment shape how emotionally invested someone gets.
That emotional investment shapes attachment and image.
Attachment and image shape trust.
Trust shapes willingness to act.
That chain matters but most training tries to skip it. Straight to the trust falls!
One part I really didn't like was that I didn't see anywhere that described the games the participants actually played. There are some games mentioned, but they are from previous studies and the games played in this particular study weren't mentioned. Unless I'm missing something.
What immediately struck me
The study treats trust as something built through repeated, coherent experience. Not a one-time message.
That is exactly what games do well. They are consistent worlds. They reward certain choices, punish others, and teach you what is true here.
But we have to be careful.
The outcome variable is willingness to travel, not actual travel behaviour. Intent is a useful proxy, but it is not the same as booking the flight. (Administrative Sciences, 2025)
So the right takeaway is not “games make people travel”, the right takeaway is, “games can build trust strongly enough to influence real-world intentions, under certain conditions.”
The part L&D should care about is that trust transfer is a design problem
If transfer trust theory holds, then trust is not something you ask for, trust is something the environment earns. Games earn it through three mechanisms that are very transferable to workplace learning design.
1. Coherence
In a good game, the world behaves predictably and that predictability is what lets players take risks.
In training, we often break coherence.
We say, “try these new behaviours!” but performance systems still reward speed over quality, and certainty over experimentation. Some systems even punish experimentation or creativity.
The learner is not irrational for withholding trust when system has earned that response.
2. Low-stakes experimentation
Games let you test ideas with cheap failure.
In real workplaces, failure is social. It is remembered. It gets attributed to competence.
So people stop experimenting. Nobody wants to be “that guy” that tried “his spin” on a classic trust fall. #facefirst
3. Emotional attachment
This is the uncomfortable one.
Attachment gets framed as “engagement,” which usually gets translated into “make it fun,” but the deeper point is that people act on things they feel connected to.
In games, you get connected because the world reacts to you, and your choices matter. There begins to be a sense of responsibility for your actions and in the right games (Ghost of Tsushima comes to mind), you begin feeling a sense of stewardship over the game.
In training, we often design for completion rather than consequence or connection.
What this suggests for game-based skill development
If you are using commercial games for soft skills, this paper gives you a specific lens for why certain sessions create “buy-in,” and others die in silence like a trust fall in the woods.
Trust transfer is not about persuasion. It is about repeated, believable experience.
Here are a few practical applications.
1. Use games as trust labs
Research insight: Trust can form in a virtual context and shape real-world intent. (Administrative Sciences, 2025)
L&D application: Do not just use a game to “teach communication.” Use it to study how trust forms under pressure.
Implementation detail: Pick a game where team success depends on information sharing and coordinated risk.
Overcooked is excellent for “do I trust you to handle your station?”
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is excellent for “do I trust your ability to process information?”
Run short rounds, then debrief:
“When did you start trusting the plan?”
“What specific behaviour earned trust?”
“What behaviour broke it, and why?”
Success indicator: The team can name trust-building behaviours in concrete terms, not just “we communicated better.”
2. Design for coherence between training and workplace reality
Research insight: Image and attachment shape trust, and trust shapes willingness to act. (Administrative Sciences, 2025)
L&D application: If you want learners to trust a new behaviour, the organization has to behave like it actually wants that behaviour.
Implementation detail: Before launching a “psychological safety” or “innovation” program, audit the system signals.
What gets praised publicly?
What gets punished quietly?
What gets promoted?
If those signals conflict with your training message, the learners will believe the system, not the facilitator.
Success indicator: Supervisors can name one policy or process they have changed to make the new behaviour safe. This is important because it shows that the action has happened already. This isn’t a promise so much as it is a pre-meditated follow through.
This is also a good indication of trust from the supervisor’s behalf that they can identify the policy or process that needs to change.
Trust falls for everyone!
3. Build trust transfer intentionally across sessions
Research insight: Trust is built through repeated experience, not a single exposure. (Administrative Sciences, 2025)
L&D application: Treat trust like strength training. One workout does not change the body.
Implementation detail: Run a short series.
Session 1: Low-stakes coordination.
Session 2: Constraints and ambiguity.
Session 3: Realistic pressure and conflicting priorities.
Each time, capture team “trust rules,” meaning the decision rules they used to decide who to rely on and when.
Success indicator: Over time, trust rules shift from personality-based (“Alex is reliable”) to behaviour-based (“We trust whoever communicates constraints early”).
FAQ
Is this just about tourism marketing?
That is the context, yes. But the mechanism is bigger. It is about how trust forms in digital environments, and how that trust shapes real-world intent. (Administrative Sciences, 2025)
Do games build trust better than team building?
Not automatically. The game is just a practice environment. The transfer comes from the design, and the debrief. A good facilitator will outperform a good training tool everyday.
What should I measure if I want to treat trust as a skill?
Measure behaviours.
Information sharing under uncertainty.
Amount of trust falls completed in one minute.
Willingness to delegate.
Speed of recovery after a mistake.
Frequency of explicit coordination (“I need you to…”).
Bottom line
This study is a reminder that trust is not a speech, it is an accumulated experience.
Games are one of the cleanest tools we have for building accumulated experience quickly, and in a way that lets people take risks without career damage.
If you are trying to build trust in a team, the question is not “how do we get them to trust each other?”
The better question is, “what environment are we giving them to earn that trust, what happens when they try, and how can we maintain it moving forward?”
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