Gratitude interventions assist individuals in the pursuit of greater personal and social well-being. Yet, little is known about whether these interventions increase interpersonal trust. In the current study, we tested whether a weekly... more
Gratitude interventions assist individuals in the pursuit of greater personal and social well-being. Yet, little is known about whether these interventions increase interpersonal trust. In the current study, we tested whether a weekly gratitude-promoting intervention enhances the decision to trust a stranger in a monetary game several days later. Furthermore, we tested whether this intervention influences emotional and physiological reactions during the trust-making decision. After completing a gratitude journaling intervention or a control condition, participants engaged in a laboratory-based trust game. Continuous self-reports of emotional valence and physiological reactivity were recorded throughout the game. Compared with the control group, participants completing the gratitude intervention experienced more positive emotions and this mediated their greater willingness to entrust more money to a stranger. Participants who received the gratitude intervention experienced higher respiration rates and systolic blood pressure responses during trust making decisions – indicative of greater motivational intensity.
Experimental evidence on pre-play communication supports a “focusing function of communication” hypothesis. Relevant communication facilitates cooperative, pro-social behavior because it causes a shift in individuals’ focus towards... more
Experimental evidence on pre-play communication supports a “focusing function of communication” hypothesis. Relevant communication facilitates cooperative, pro-social behavior because it causes a shift in individuals’ focus towards strategies dictated by some salient social norm. After reviewing the formal foundations for a general theory of conformity to social norms, we provide an original application illustrating how a framework that allows for different conjectures about norms is able to capture the focusing function of communication and to explain experimental results.
Enhanced participation has been prescribed as the way forward for improving democratic decision making while generating positive attributes like trust. Yet we do not know the extent to which rules affect the outcome of decision making.... more
Enhanced participation has been prescribed as the way forward for improving democratic decision making while generating positive attributes like trust. Yet we do not know the extent to which rules affect the outcome of decision making. This article investigates how different group decision rules affect group trust by testing three ideal types of decision rules (i.e., a Unilateral rule, a Representative rule and a 'Non-rule') in a laboratory experiment. The article shows significant differences between the three decision rules on trust after deliberation. Interestingly, however, it finds that the Representative rule yields more trust than the Non-rule and also significantly more trust than the Unilateral rule, when analysing the results at group level. These findings challenge the theoretical understanding by, for example, deliberative normative theorists that more inclusive, consensual and non-hierarchical decision-making procedures enhance trust vis-à-vis other more hierarchical decision-making procedures.
A large body of empirical research has found a negative correlation between trust and income inequality. However, little is known about how this relationship depends on the income distribution mechanism in a society. This paper provides... more
A large body of empirical research has found a negative correlation between trust and income inequality. However, little is known about how this relationship depends on the income distribution mechanism in a society. This paper provides evidence that individuals not only care about the level of inequality in their society , but also about the process behind it. We run a laboratory experiment with 240 subjects in which individuals are placed in either a small, high-income class or a larger, low-income class, in either a low-inequality or high-inequality environment. Furthermore, class assignment is determined by a merit-based, greed-based or random allocation mechanism. Consistent with the literature, income inequality negatively impacts trust in the treatment in which income classes are determined randomly. When the income distribution mechanism is based on either merit or greed, however, we cannot conclude that changes in income inequality affect trust within the group. Our findings are robust against selection effects. We suggest that our results may be driven by the influence of the distribution mechanism on ingroup/outgroup effects.
In modern societies more and more people interact with strangers in one-shot situations. Therefore, it is important to study how compliance with norms can be enforced in such settings. Surprisingly little research has went down this road... more
In modern societies more and more people interact with strangers in one-shot situations. Therefore, it is important to study how compliance with norms can be enforced in such settings. Surprisingly little research has went down this road – and even less studies have been focusing on behavioral changes of people in anticipation of reward rather than of punishment by impartial strangers. In this experimental paper an impartial third party can reward a stranger for acting according to a desired behavioral norm. The reward is costly and cannot be strategically motivated. Subjects strategically increases their trustworthiness towards others if they can anticipate to be rewarded for such behavior by an impartial third party (positive strong indirect reciprocity). Positive strong indirect reciprocity exists and it does not diminish if it can be anticipated (no motivational crowding out).
The trust game has become the behavioral measure of choice in social science investigations of trust. This measure is often used uncritically to compare levels of trust across people and cultures even though those levels may be affected... more
The trust game has become the behavioral measure of choice in social science investigations of trust. This measure is often used uncritically to compare levels of trust across people and cultures even though those levels may be affected by people's attitudes to risk. We evaluate an incentive-compatible experiment designed to investigate the potential for a risk-trust confound using a sample of 202 students at the University of Cape Town in 2016. We depart from the earlier risk-trust literature by using a risk preference task that incorporates a wide range of prizes and probabilities. This allows us to investigate whether earlier ambiguous results concerning risk-trust interactions simply reflect weak measurement instruments, and facilitates the estimation of structural econometric risk preference models. We find that amounts sent in the trust game are indeed associated with attitudes to risk, that the magnitude of this relationship is economically significant, and that it is robust across statistical models. In addition, we find that most previous studies of the risk-trust confound use preference elicitation mechanisms that are underpowered for identifying risk-trust relationships. Our results caution against the widespread use of the trust game to measure and compare levels of trust without careful adjustments for risk attitudes.
Cooperation is essential to reap efficiency gains from specialization, not least in poor communities where economic transactions are often informal. Yet, cooperation might be more difficult to sustain under scarcity, since defecting from... more
Cooperation is essential to reap efficiency gains from specialization, not least in poor communities where economic transactions are often informal. Yet, cooperation might be more difficult to sustain under scarcity, since defecting from a cooperative equilibrium can yield safe, short-run benefits. In this study, we investigate how scarcity affects cooperation by leveraging exogenous variation in economic conditions induced by the Msimu harvest in rural Tanzania. We document significant changes in food consumption between the pre- and post-harvest period, and show that lean season scarcity reduces socially efficient but personally risky investment in a framed investment game. This can contribute to what is commonly referred to as a behavioral poverty trap.
A stream of research examining the effect of punishment on conformity indicates that punishment can backfire and lead to suboptimal social outcomes. In such studies, the enforcement of a behavioral rule to cooperate originates from a... more
A stream of research examining the effect of punishment on conformity indicates that punishment can backfire and lead to suboptimal social outcomes. In such studies, the enforcement of a behavioral rule to cooperate originates from a single party. This feature may raise concern about the legitimacy of the rule and thereby make it easy for the agents to take a penalty and excuse their selfish behavior. We address the question of punishment legitimacy in our experiment by shedding light upon the importance of social norms and their interplay with punishment mechanisms. We show that the separate enforcement mechanisms of punishment and norms cannot achieve higher cooperation rates. In fact, conformity is significantly increased only in those cases when social norms and punishment are combined, but only when cooperation is cheap. Interestingly, when cooperation is expensive we find that the combination of punishment and empirical information about others’ conformity can also have traceable detrimental effects on conformity levels. Our results have important implications for researchers and practitioners alike.
Maladaptive social interaction and its related psychopathology have been highlighted in psychiatry especially among younger generations. In Japan, novel expressive forms of psychiatric phenomena such as "modern-type depression" and... more
Maladaptive social interaction and its related psychopathology have been highlighted in psychiatry especially among younger generations. In Japan, novel expressive forms of psychiatric phenomena such as "modern-type depression" and "hikikomori" (a syndrome of severe social withdrawal lasting for at least six months) have been reported especially among young people. Economic games such as the trust game have been utilized to evaluate real-world interpersonal relationships as a novel candidate for psychiatric evaluations. To investigate the relationship between trusting behaviors and various psychometric scales, we conducted a trust game experiment with eighty-one Japanese university students as a pilot study. Participants made a risky financial decision about whether to trust each of 40 photographed partners. Participants then answered a set of questionnaires with seven scales including the Lubben Social Network Scale (LSNS)-6 and the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ)-9. Consistent with previous research, male participants trusted partners more than female participants. Regression analysis revealed that LSNS-family (perceived support from family) for male participants, and item 8 of PHQ-9 (subjective agitation and/or retardation) for female participants were associated with participants' trusting behaviors. Consistent with claims by social scientists, our data suggest that, for males, support from family was negatively associated with cooperative behavior toward non-family members. Females with higher subjective agitation (and/or retardation) gave less money toward males and high attractive females, but not toward low attractive females in interpersonal relationships. We believe that our data indicate the possible impact of economic games in psychiatric research and clinical practice, and validation in clinical samples including modern-type depression and hikikomori should be investigated.
The present study examined people’s expectations of how incidental emotions could shape others’ reciprocity in trusting situations, whether these expectations affect people’s own behavior, and how accurate these expectations are. Study... more
The present study examined people’s expectations of how incidental emotions could shape
others’ reciprocity in trusting situations, whether these expectations affect people’s own
behavior, and how accurate these expectations are. Study 1 explored people’s beliefs about the
effects of different incidental emotions on another person’s trustworthiness in general. In Studies
2 and 3, senders in trust games faced angry, guilty, grateful, or emotionally neutral responders.
Participants who were told about their counterpart’s emotional state acted consistently with their
beliefs about how these emotions would affect the other’s trustworthiness. These beliefs were
not always correct, however. There were significant deviations between the expected behavior of
angry responders and such responders’ actual behavior. These findings raise the possibility that
one player’s knowledge of the other’s emotional state may lead to action choices that yield poor
outcomes for both players.
The sweeping and extensive penetration of the Internet generates endless possibilities for emergent associations and exchange. Engendering trust may be critical to enabling agents to gain from such exchange; for example, trust can assist... more
The sweeping and extensive penetration of the Internet generates endless possibilities for emergent associations and exchange. Engendering trust may be critical to enabling agents to gain from such exchange; for example, trust can assist in overcoming dilemmas related to multinational organizations, global virtual teams, auction and barter sites, house exchange sites, peer-to-peer file swapping sites, and on and on (Iacono and Weisband 1997; Jarvenpaa and Leidner 1999; Kirkman et al. 2002). The formation and continuance of trust online, however, runs into obstacles that jeopardize the fulfillment of the great potentials of the Internet for mutually beneficial exchange (see Nissenbaum 2004; Dutton and Shepherd 2003; Ben-Ner and Putterman 2003.) The logic of repetition and expectation of future exchange is a primary generator of trust in everyday life (Hardin 2002). But online exchanges are often singular, and may not be supported by thick relationships, geographic proximity, or FtF (face-to-face) interaction between agents. The formation of local norms can engender cooperation as well (Cook and Hardin 2001), but online spaces are often normatively thin. Without trust the great potential of the Internet for exchange may be jeopardized, crowding out entrepreneurs and traders. This chapter explores the possibilities of generating trust and cooperation online, and looks at mechanisms that emerge to overcome risk and facilitate cooperation. Following Harvey James (2002), I distinguish between two methods of managing trust problems. One is generating trust by altering agents' expectations about the future behavior of others, without institutional intervention and leaving agents' vulnerability intact. A second approach involves establishing institutions that alter the strategic setting, transforming the problem of trust into one about the competence of third parties. The distinction between trust-based cooperation and cooperation without trust frames the rest of this chapter.
Inequality in wealth is a pressing concern in many contemporary societies, where it has been show to co-occur with political polarization and policy volatility, however its causes are unclear. Here we demonstrate in a simple model where... more
Inequality in wealth is a pressing concern in many contemporary societies, where it has been show to co-occur with political polarization and policy volatility, however its causes are unclear. Here we demonstrate in a simple model where social behavior spreads through learning that inequality can covary reliably with other cooperative behavior, despite a lack of ex-ogenous cause or deliberate coordination. In the context of simulated cultural evolution selecting for trust and cooperative exchange, we find both cooperation and inequality to be more prevalent in contexts where the same agents play both the roles of the trusting investor and the trusted investee, in contrast to the condition where these roles are divided between disjoint populations. Cooperation is more likely in contexts of high transparency about potential partners and with a high amount of partner choice; while inequality is more likely with high information but no choice in partners for those that want to invest. While not yet a full model of contemporary society, our approach holds promise for examining the causality and social contexts underlying shifts in income inequality.
Maladaptive social interaction and its related psychopathology have been highlighted in psychiatry especially among younger generations. In Japan, novel expressive forms of psychiatric phenomena such as "modern-type depression"... more
Maladaptive social interaction and its related psychopathology have been highlighted in psychiatry especially among younger generations. In Japan, novel expressive forms of psychiatric phenomena such as "modern-type depression" and "hikikomori" (a syndrome of severe social withdrawal lasting for at least six months) have been reported especially among young people. Economic games such as the trust game have been utilized to evaluate real-world interpersonal relationships as a novel candidate for psychiatric evaluations. To investigate the relationship between trusting behaviors and various psychometric scales, we conducted a trust game experiment with eighty-one Japanese university students as a pilot study. Participants made a risky financial decision about whether to trust each of 40 photographed partners. Participants then answered a set of questionnaires with seven scales including the Lubben Social Network Scale (LSNS)-6 and the Patient Health Questionnaire ...
Maladaptive social interaction and its related psychopathology have been highlighted in psychiatry especially among younger generations. In Japan, novel expressive forms of psychiatric phenomena such as "modern-type depression"... more
Maladaptive social interaction and its related psychopathology have been highlighted in psychiatry especially among younger generations. In Japan, novel expressive forms of psychiatric phenomena such as "modern-type depression" and "hikikomori" (a syndrome of severe social withdrawal lasting for at least six months) have been reported especially among young people. Economic games such as the trust game have been utilized to evaluate real-world interpersonal relationships as a novel candidate for psychiatric evaluations. To investigate the relationship between trusting behaviors and various psychometric scales, we conducted a trust game experiment with eighty-one Japanese university students as a pilot study. Participants made a risky financial decision about whether to trust each of 40 photographed partners. Participants then answered a set of questionnaires with seven scales including the Lubben Social Network Scale (LSNS)-6 and the Patient Health Questionnaire ...
