Who Shall I Trust? Trust As a Mediator between Identity Salience and Cooperative Behavior

Abstract

We explore the role of trust as a mediating process in the relationship between group identity salience and cooperative behavior. Participants from two academic disciplines, psychology and economics, make decisions in two cooperation games with an unknown partner. Their decisions reflect conditions of shared or unshared identity. Our results confirm earlier findings that participants cooperate more when they share an identity with their partner. We find that even when we control for generalized trust, depersonalized trust mediates the effect, that shared identity thus increases depersonalized trust, which leads to increased cooperative behavior. We link our research to the neuroscience approach and provide directions for future research in (social) neuroeconomics.