Abstract
Trustful and trustworthy behaviors have important externalities for the society. But what exactly drives people to behave in a trustful and trustworthy manner? Building on research suggesting that individuals’ social preferences might be a common factor informing both behaviors, we study the impact of a set of different motives on individuals’ choices in a dual-role Trust Game (TG). We employ data from a large-scale representative experiment (N = 774), where all subjects played both roles of a binary TG with real monetary incentives. Subjects’ social motives were inferred using their decisions in a Dictator Game and a dual-role Ultimatum Game. Next to self-interest and strategic motives we consider preferences for altruism, spitefulness, egalitarianism, and efficiency. We demonstrate that there exists considerable heterogeneity in motives in the TG. Most importantly, among individuals who choose to trust as trustors, social motives can differ dramatically as there is a non-negligible proportion of them who seem to act out of (strategic) self-interest whereas others are driven more by efficiency considerations. Subjects’ elicited trustworthiness, however, can be used to infer such motivations: while the former are not trustworthy as trustees, the latter are. We discuss that research on trust can benefit from adding the second player’s choice in TG designs.
Highlights
Trustful and trustworthy individuals constitute an asset for their societies
For many years and across disciplines, the consensus has been that trust is a form of encapsulated self-interest; an expression of a calculated risky decision based on the individual’s expectations regarding others’ trustworthiness
In the TG, a first player has the option to send an amount of money to Heterogeneous Motives in Trust Game a second player
Summary
Trustful and trustworthy individuals constitute an asset for their societies. Evidence documenting positive associations between general interpersonal trust levels or perceived trustworthiness and important country indicators such as economic prosperity, social equality, health, and happiness abounds (Kawachi et al, 1997; Knack and Keefer, 1997; Guiso et al, 2006, 2008; Oishi et al, 2011). While there is evidence that suggests a positive effect of altruism on trustworthiness (Ashraf et al, 2006; Chaudhuri and Gangadharan, 2007; Kovacs and Willinger, 2013), previous results regarding its impact on trust are less consistent (Dufwenberg and Gneezy, 2000; Cox, 2004; Brülhart and Usunier, 2012). If the two players start the game with identical amounts of money (as in Berg et al, 1995), trusting would lead to a more unequal outcome than not trusting for any realistic expectations of trustworthiness – except when the trustor believes that every trustee will return exactly half of the money generated in the exchange – so that an egalitarian trustor should not necessarily pass the money. We must note that individuals may switch strategies across games for instance as a result of moral licensing, a possibility that we cannot exclude (Monin and Miller, 2001; Dunning, 2007; Brañas-Garza et al, 2013; but see Gneezy et al, 2012, who find that licensing is less of an issue when social/moral decisions are “costly,” as it is the case in our design)
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