Religion and political affiliation’s influence on trust and reciprocity among strangers.

Abstract

Human cooperation has led to the social lifestyle that our world thrives on today. Many common groups – such as religious and political affiliations – facilitate this social lifestyle by advocating trust, reciprocity, and cooperation among group members; however, studies on trust and reciprocity tend to manipulate group identity via assigning participants to arbitrary groups rather than investigating the potential relationship with actual social groups (e.g., religion and politics). Therefore, the present study empirically tested the relationships that may exist between actual group memberships, arbitrary group membership, trust, and reciprocity. Two studies (N = 144 per study) were conducted with a computerized “trust” game to measure trust and reciprocity between people based on political affiliation, religious denomination, and arbitrary identification. Results indicated that people trusted their fellow in-group members more than out-group members, and trusted religious and political in-group members more than arbitrary in-group members. Participants also gave more money to in-group members than out-group members for both meaningful and arbitrary group identities. There were no significant differences in the amount of money given to actual and arbitrary in-group members. These are the first two studies to date that have examined whether different types of in-groups elicit different levels of reciprocal exchange.