Abstract
Determinants of cooperation include ingroup vs. outgroup membership, and individual traits, such as prosociality and trust. We investigated whether these factors can be overridden by beliefs about people’s trust. We manipulated the information players received about each other’s level of general trust, “high” or “low”. These levels were either measured (Experiment 1) or just arbitrarily assigned labels (Experiment 2). Players’ choices whether to cooperate or defect in a stag hunt (or an assurance game)—where it is mutually beneficial to cooperate, but costly if the partner should fail to do so—were strongly predicted by what they were told about the other player’s trust label, as well as by what they were told that the other player was told about their own label. Our findings demonstrate the importance for cooperation in a risky coordination game of both first- and second-order beliefs about how much people trust each other. This supports the idea that institutions can influence cooperation simply by influencing beliefs.
Highlights
A fundamental observation about humans is that we can cooperate to achieve a desired outcome that individuals would not be able to achieve on their own
And sociologically oriented researchers may focus on how cooperation depends on individual traits like social value orientation or generalised trust (e.g., [3, 4]), or on social identities and group membership (e.g., [5,6,7])
A more recent study showed that common knowledge of group membership is a moderator of ingroup bias, but when both group membership and knowledge about it is shared, both trusting behaviour and beliefs about contributions increase [24]. These findings make plausible, but do not give direct evidence for, the effect of higher-order trust that we examine in this paper
Summary
A fundamental observation about humans is that we can cooperate to achieve a desired outcome that individuals would not be able to achieve on their own. The scope of this capacity to cooperate appears to be quite unlimited: cooperation may occur in the family and between strangers, in matters big and small, and on scales ranging from dyads to societies [1]. And sociologically oriented researchers may focus on how cooperation depends on individual traits like social value orientation or generalised trust (e.g., [3, 4]), or on social identities and group membership (e.g., [5,6,7]). Political scientists and economists may instead focus on how cooperation is shaped by (boundedly) rational responses
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