Abstract
The current study sought to examine the association between the level of general trust and the judgment accuracy of others’ cooperativeness. Based on data collected from 107 female first-year undergraduate students, we demonstrated that a high level of general trust was associated with a high level of judgment accuracy of group members’ cooperation in a social dilemma game. Additional analysis suggested that the association was present even when the judgment accuracy was divided into hit rate (i.e., the rate of correct judgment on the cooperator as a cooperative) and correct rejection rate (i.e., the rate of correct judgment on the non-cooperator as a non-cooperative) by controlling the participants’ judgment bias, Big Five personality traits, and the proportion of cooperators in the group. These results are in accordance with previous studies insofar as they suggest that high trusters are more skilled at discerning others’ trustworthiness. The current study adds to the evidence that high trusters have increased cognitive skills and supports Yamagishi’s emancipation theory of trust.
Highlights
Trusting others is not the same as being gullible (Yamagishi, 2011)
As the results of zero-order correlation3 show, the level of general trust was significantly positively correlated with judgment accuracy (r = .22, p < .05, 95% CI [.03, .39]) and positively correlated with hit rate (r = .21, p < .05, 95% CI [.03, .39]), non-significant correlation was observed with correct rejection rate (r = −.04)
We examined the partial correlation by controlling these two variables, along with the participant’s Big Five personality traits, and found that the level of general trust was significantly positively correlated with judgment accuracy (r = .24, p < .05, 95% CI [.04, .41]), positively correlated with hit rate (r = .22, p < .05, 95% CI [.02, .40]), and positively correlated with correct rejection rate (r = .22, p < .05, 95% CI [.03, .40]
Summary
Trusting others is not the same as being gullible (Yamagishi, 2011). This may be contrary to the general understanding of trustful persons, especially among Japanese people. Kikuchi et al (1997) demonstrated that high trusters, as determined by Yamagishi and Yamagishi’s (1994) general trust scale, were better able to predict who had made a cooperative choice in a prisoner’s dilemma game after a brief face-toface conversation. Subsequent research using Japanese and American university student samples has demonstrated that high trusters can judge others’ altruistic propensity through non-verbal cues after watching fivesecond video clips of Japanese target persons (Shinada et al, 2011). These findings suggest that high trusters have high levels of discernment, providing support for Yamagishi’s (2011) “emancipation theory of trust.”
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