Trust Game Research Articles

Relation between parenting style and confident decision-making in a student population.

Parenting styles differ in their expression of care and (over)protection behaviors and are associated with markedly different outcomes in children. While research has examined the effects of parenting styles on global self-esteem and self-efficacy, little is known about how they might relate to decision-confidence (metacognitive bias) in a task. This study examined the possible relation between students' decision-confidence and the perceived parenting style of their primary caregiver. Participants (N = 246) played a trust game and rated their confidence in task choices. The perceived parenting style of their caregiver was determined using participants' responses to the Parental Bonding Instrument. Participants' decision-confidence was not significantly associated with their caregiver's parenting style. However, decision-confidence was positively related with self-efficacy to a small degree. Exploratory analyses indicated that participants with overprotective caregivers were more likely to report poor self-efficacy and self-esteem; increased depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms; childhood adversity; and anxious and avoidant attachment; while participants with caring caregivers showed the opposite pattern. Our results are a step towards understanding the potential effects of parenting on adult children's decision-confidence and contribute to growing evidence that perceived parental behaviors have strong associations with young adults' mental health, self-worth, and relationship attachment.

Impact of organizational structure and in-organization resource allocation on trust and trustworthiness

We experimentally investigated how different organizational structures (horizontal, vertical) and in-organization resource allocation methods (equal, unequal) impact individuals’ trust-related behavior using a two-stage, three-player trust game. As factors influencing trust or trustworthiness, we focused on influential and resource-based power shaped by organizational structures and resource allocation methods, respectively. We expanded the inequity aversion model with power inequities and demonstrated that power inequities can impact individuals’ inequity aversion and therefore their trust-related behavior. In the equal resource allocation treatment, the trustees exhibited a greater probability of being trustworthy, and the trustors were more trusting in the horizontal structure treatment. Those trustees holding both power types significantly encouraged trust and trustworthiness, while influential power was more effective in increasing trustworthiness. This study makes a novel theoretical contribution by exploring the motivation factors of power inequity aversion and explaining how organizational structures and resource allocation methods impact individuals’ trust-related behavior via inequity aversion.

Festival games: Inebriated and sober altruists

We report a staged field experiment during three concerts in the South of Italy characterized by the same traditional music and a comparable average level of alcohol consumption by attendees. Individual blood alcohol concentration is measured with electronic breathalyzers. The experimental games are payoff-equivalent private property and common property trust games. We find that alcohol consumption is associated with less sharing in the private property game and lower efficiency in the common property game. There is a game-form effect for sober participants who share less in the common property game than in the private property game. This finding is consistent with revealed altruism theory as more sharing reveals more altruistic behavior. The absence of such game-form effect among non-sober participants is consistent with alcohol myopia. Tourists share more than local residents, significantly so for sober participants. The private property game elicits more efficiency than the common property game. This game-form effect is robust across sober and non-sober participants.

Commitment to the truth creates trust in market exchange: Experimental evidence

Under incomplete contracts, the mutual belief in reciprocity facilitates how traders create value through economic exchange. Creating such beliefs among strangers can be challenging even when they are allowed to communicate, because communication is cheap. In this paper, we first extend the literature showing that a truth-telling oath increases honesty to a sequential trust game with pre-play, fixed-form, and cheap-talk communication. Our results confirm that the oath creates more trust and cooperative behavior thanks to an improvement in communication; but we also show that the oath induces selection into communication — it makes people more wary of using communication, precisely because communication speaks louder under oath. We next designed additional treatments featuring mild and deterrent fines for deception to measure the monetary equivalent of the non-monetary incentives implemented by a truth-telling oath. We find that the oath is behaviorally equivalent to mild fines. The deterrent fine induces the highest level of cooperation. Altogether, these results confirm that allowing for interactions under oath within a trust game with communication creates significantly more economic value than the identical exchange institutions without the oath.

Payoff-driven migration promotes the evolution of trust in networked populations

Establishing and maintaining trustworthy behaviors in large populations of self-interested individuals is a significant problem which received extensive attentions from research fields such as evolutionary biology, economics, sociology and engineering. As a well-known model that captures social trust dilemmas, the N-player trust game is adopted to investigate the evolution of trust in groups consisting of investors and trustees. In addition, to model real scenarios in dynamic environments, we introduce a novel migration mechanism, called adaptive environment-benefit-driven migration, which considers the influence of individuals’ payoffs on migration. Through theoretical analysis and Monte Carlo simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the migration mechanism on facilitating trust behaviors in the framework of evolutionary game theory. We find that the population density plays a crucial role in establishing trust. Simulation results reveal that trust can be fostered in a dynamic environment influenced by individual migration with the medium vacancy rate. This work significantly contributes to the understanding of mutual trust behaviors in networked social systems from a more realistic perspective.

Navigating the Social Environment: Linking Motivations, Impressions, and Behaviors Via a Sampling Approach to Trustworthiness.

Our understanding of impression formation comes from experiments constraining participants' control over information sampling. This limits our understanding of how people sample information when forming impressions as well as the effects of self-generated samples on impressions. Our paradigm allows participants to actively collect information samples. This work investigates how people explore the social environment and how sampled information informs resulting impressions. Four experiments tested theoretically-driven predictions regarding information sampling patterns under interested and disinterested information search. Under interested search, participants truncated the sampling of social targets showing early untrustworthy behavior. Under disinterested search, participants sampled extensively and systematically, avoiding small-sample biases. The sampled information, once obtained, accurately determines final impressions. Moreover, we documented a direct link between sampled information and subsequent behaviors (partner selection in trust games, trustworthiness expectations). By investigating sampling-based trustworthiness impressions, the present research informs the origins of trustworthiness and sampling accounts of judgment and decision-making.

Atypical dynamic trust learning in individuals with high autistic traits in a multi-round trust game with multiple trustworthiness cues

BackgroundUnderstanding the trust-building process, especially in contexts requiring the integration of multiple trustworthiness cues, is a fundamental aspect of social interactions among individuals with high autistic traits (ATs). It can offer valuable insights into the social functioning of these individuals. MethodParticipants with high and low ATs (N = 120; 30 in each group for two experiments) completed a 10-round trust game that embedded various trustworthiness cues, including reputation, advice (Experiment 1 = direct advice; Experiment 2 = social-emotional advice), and reciprocity. Linear mixed-effects models with investment rates as the dependent variable were used to analyze the data. ResultsMethodologically, the experimental results elucidated the fundamental characteristics of dynamic trust formation within the context of multidimensional trust information. Furthermore, High-AT individuals showed assigned less weight to reciprocity but relied heavily on reputation, and exhibited maladaptive advice-taking. Unlike low-AT individuals, high-AT individuals did not adaptively reduce reputational effect over rounds. ConclusionsOur findings highlight the unique challenges faced by individuals with high ATs when navigating complex social interactions.

Trust and Delegated Investing: A Money Doctors Experiment

Abstract The more trust investors place in a money manager, the more confident they are to take risk (Gennaioli, Shleifer, and Vishny 2015). We test this theory in a laboratory experiment using the amount returned from a trust game as measure of trustworthiness. Investors increase the share invested risky with high-cost money managers compared to those with low costs when the highcost money managers are more trustworthy than the low-cost ones. The willingness to take more risk with high-cost money managers is increasing in the difference in trustworthiness. Up to a third of the difference in trustworthiness translates into an increasing risky share. Vice versa, investors are willing to accept higher costs for investments made through more trustworthy money managers. Our findings are robust to alternative explanations, demonstrating that the riskaversion channel can be sufficient for trust to influence behavior.

Trust building with artificial intelligence: comparing with human in investment behaviour, emotional arousal and neuro activities

This study investigated on people’s two-stage iterative trust building process (the initial trust stage and the iteration from feedback stage) with AI partners, and made comparisons with human partners in the aspects of investment behavior, emotional arousal and neuro activities. The experiment was designed using repeated trust games and the investment amount was transformed into the initial trust, the feedback from the partner and the final trust. Comparisons of behavior were conducted by regression analysis. The results showed that the initial trust for AI had stronger influence on the final trust than human partners, while the feedback from human during interaction had stronger influence than the feedback from AI. By emotion scales, it was found that the arousal of participants’ positive emotions was more significant when interacting with human than with AI, and the emotional arousal (both positive and negative ones) had stronger correlation with the feedback from human than from AI.. The findings indicated a stronger influence of feedback from human partners on decision making and emotional arousal than from AI partners. The fNIRS results also showed that people’s neuro activities in the PFC were stronger when making investment decisions towards human than AI partners.

Evolution of trust in N-player trust games with loss assessment.

Trust plays a crucial role in social and economic interactions, serving as the foundation for social stability and human cooperation. Previous studies have explored the evolution of trust between investors and trustees by constructing trust game models, incorporating factors such as network structure, reputation, and incentives. However, these studies often assume that investors consistently maintain their investment behavior, neglecting the potential influence of the investment environment on investment behavior. To address this gap, we introduce a loss assessment mechanism and construct a trust game model. Specifically, investors first allocate their investment amount to an assessment agency, which divides the amount into two parts according to a certain allocation ratio. One part is used for investment assessment, and the results are fed back to the investors. If the payoff from this portion exceeds the investors' expected value, the remaining amount is invested; otherwise, it is returned to the investors. The results indicate that investors with moderate expectations are more likely to form alliances with trustworthy trustees, thereby effectively promoting the evolution of trust. Conversely, lower or higher expectations yield opposite results. Additionally, we find that as investors' expected values increase, the corresponding allocation ratio should also increase to achieve higher payoffs.

Is Mistrust in Early Adolescence Referent-specific? Looking at the Validity of Different Mistrust Referents in Sixth Graders

This study examined whether social mistrust in early adolescence was general or referent-specific. We used a multi-trait multi-method approach to examine the validity of mistrust measures across social referents (mistrust toward people in general, toward peers, and toward teachers), using questionnaires and an online task. Sixth graders ( N = 1243, ca. 11–13 years) in southern China reported about mistrust (i.e., general, teacher and peer), their social anxiety and aggression. Part of the students ( N = 262) played an online trust game against a virtual, unfamiliar peer. Confirmatory factor analyses showed that mistrust was distinguishable across referents. All referents of mistrust were significantly associated with social anxiety and aggression, whereas only peer mistrust was associated with peer-trust behavior in the online game. As such, our findings may underscore the referent-specificity of mistrust in early adolescence. Insights for promoting healthy school adjustment were discussed.

Social identity in trusting artificial intelligence agents: Evidence from lab and online experiments

AbstractThis paper explores human trust in artificial intelligence (AI), focusing on the effects of social categorization (ingroup vs. outgroup) and AI human‐likeness through two pre‐registered studies involving 160 participants each. The first study, a lab experiment in China, and the second, an online experiment representative of the United States, both utilized a trust game to assess trust across four conditions: ingroup‐humanoid AI, ingroup‐non‐humanoid AI, outgroup‐humanoid AI, and outgroup‐non‐humanoid AI. Results indicated higher trust for ingroup and humanoid AIs, with statistical significance. Mixed‐design ANOVA was used to analyze the data, revealing significant main effects and interactions. The second study also identified an emotional connection as a mediator in trust, suggesting significant design implications for AI in trust‐critical sectors like healthcare and autonomous transportation.

Which Measures of Beliefs About Others’ Prosociality Predict Prosocial Behavior in Economic Games?

Prosocial behavior often entails the possibility to be exploited by other people. Correspondingly, situations affording prosocial behavior are often characterized by one’s dependence on others’ unknown behavior. In such situations, actors will arguably assess the risk of being taken advantage of by others before making a decision. Thus, prosocial behavior might be shaped by how prosocial actors generally believe others to be (e.g., trustworthy vs. exploitative). However, a recent investigation found no consistent evidence that perceiver effects, which describe interindividual differences in judging others’ personality in first impressions and thus capture beliefs about others’ prosociality, predict prosocial behavior (Rau et al., 2020). We replicate and extend these findings by pursuing two approaches to examine the influence of beliefs about others’ prosociality on behavior in four behavioral games (public goods game, trust game as trustor and trustee, mind game), two of which involve dependence on others under uncertainty. In our main study (N = 962), perceiver effects failed to predict prosocial behavior. This was confirmed by a meta-analysis of all studies that investigated this relation, providing strong evidence against the predictive validity of perceiver effects for behavior in economic games. In a follow-up analysis, generalized expectations (as measured by generalized trust) predicted prosocial behavior in one of the two relevant games while controlling for honesty-humility, which we interpret as tentative evidence for the role of generalized expectations in prosocial behavior in economic games. We contemplate that the discrepancy between perceiver effects and generalized expectations as measures of beliefs about others’ prosociality might be attributable to their implicit vs. explicit nature and suggest future research to explore whether perceiver effects predict more implicit measures of prosocial behavior.

Trust in adolescence: Development, mechanisms and future directions

Trust is the glue of society. While the trust we place in close others is crucial for our wellbeing, trust in strangers is important to fulfill needs that families and friends cannot provide. Adolescence is an important phase for the development of trust in strangers, because the social world of adolescents expands tremendously. We provide an overview of the development of trust in adolescence by reviewing studies that used the trust game, an experimental paradigm to measure trust between dyads during monetary exchange. We start from the notion that trust is a form of social reinforcement learning in which prior beliefs about the trustworthiness of others are continuously updated by new information. Within this framework, development in adolescence is characterized by increasing uncertainty of prior beliefs, a greater tolerance of uncertainty, and a greater tendency to seek and use new information. Accordingly, there is evidence for an increase in initial trust and better adaptation of trust during repeated interactions. Childhood psychological and social-economic adversity may impact this development negatively. To further our understanding of these individual differences, we suggest ways in which the trust game can be enriched to capture trust dilemmas that are relevant to youth with diverse backgrounds.

Adapting to uncertainty: The role of anxiety and fear of negative evaluation in learning in social and non-social contexts

BackgroundNavigating social situations can be challenging due to uncertainty surrounding the intentions and strategies of others, which remain hidden and subject to change. Prior research suggests that individuals with anxiety-related symptoms struggle to adapt their learning in uncertain, non-social environments. Anxiety-prone individuals encounter challenges in social functioning, yet research on learning under uncertainty in social contexts is limited. In this preregistered study, we investigated whether individuals with higher levels of trait anxiety and fear of negative evaluation encounter difficulties in adjusting their learning rates in social contexts with stable or volatile outcome contingencies. MethodsWe implemented a modified trust game (N = 190), where participants either retained or lost their investments based on their interactions with two players in volatile or stable environments. Participants also completed a matching non-social control task involving interactions with slot machines. ResultsResults from computational modeling revealed significantly higher learning rates in social compared to non-social settings. Trait anxiety did not affect the adaptability of learning rates. Individuals with heightened fear of negative evaluation were more sensitive to social compared to non-social outcomes, as reflected in their stay/switch behavior and, though less conclusive, in their learning rates. LimitationsWhile transdiagnostic and dimensional approaches are important for investigating disturbed social functioning, the inclusion of clinical samples in future studies may contribute to a broader generalization of these findings regarding behavioral variances in uncertain social environments. ConclusionsIndividuals with increased fear of negative evaluation may demonstrate heightened sensitivity to learning in uncertain social contexts. This leads to heightened responsiveness to recent outcomes in their interactions with others, potentially contributing to their problems in social functioning.

Ethnic bias, economic achievement and trust between large ethnic groups: A study in Germany and the U.S

Evidence for ingroup bias is extensive, yet the distinct patterns of discrimination among dominant ethnic groups in the diverse societies of modern industrial nations such as the United States and Germany remain largely unexplored. Incentivized trust games in nationally-representative samples from both countries reveal biases of roughly equal size by non-Hispanic White Americans, Hispanic Americans, and African Americans against each outgroup. In Germany, the majority demonstrates twice as much bias against Turkish minorities compared to Eastern Europeans. Interestingly, both minority groups send similar amounts to ethnic Germans and members of their own groups. We examine the notion that outgroup discrimination by majority group members stems from stereotypes of minorities as economically unsuccessful, employing trust games with high-income counterparts. We find that majority senders’ bias against minority receivers declines when receivers are known to have high incomes, in line with that idea. Interestingly, some minority groups, especially Turkish descendants, display a negative propensity to transfer to rich members of their ingroup in comparison with outgroup members, relative to baseline. While we focus on differences in sending by ethnic pairing, we note that all participants send less to second movers identified as high income, and discuss possible explanations. We estimate that four-fifths of the observed ingroup bias is taste-based rather than due to expected trustworthiness differences. This estimation is robust to identifying the purely altruistic component of trust game sending toward each ethnic group, including one's own.

Callousness, exploitativeness, and tracking of cooperation incentives in the human default network

Human cognitive capacities that enable flexible cooperation may have evolved in parallel with the expansion of frontoparietal cortical networks, particularly the default network. Conversely, human antisocial behavior and trait antagonism are broadly associated with reduced activity, impaired connectivity, and altered structure of the default network. Yet, behaviors like interpersonal manipulation and exploitation may require intact or even superior social cognition. Using a reinforcement learning model of decision-making on a modified trust game, we examined how individuals adjusted their cooperation rate based on a counterpart's cooperation and social reputation. We observed that learning signals in the default network updated the predicted utility of cooperation or defection and scaled with reciprocal cooperation. These signals were weaker in callous (vs. compassionate) individuals but stronger in those who were more exploitative (vs. honest and humble). Further, they accounted for associations between exploitativeness, callousness, and reciprocal cooperation. Separately, behavioral sensitivity to prior reputation was reduced in callous but not exploitative individuals and selectively scaled with responses of the medial temporal subsystem of the default network. Overall, callousness was characterized by blunted behavioral and default network sensitivity to cooperation incentives. Exploitativeness predicted heightened sensitivity to others' cooperation but not social reputation. We speculate that both compassion and exploitativeness may reflect cognitive adaptations to social living, enabled by expansion of the default network in anthropogenesis.

The Immunization Effect of Internal Control System Transparency following a Supplier’s Violation of Buyer Trust

ABSTRACT In this study, we show that a supplier’s internal controls (ICs) that lead to either falling short of or to exceeding buyer expectations play an important role in the trust a buyer has in its supplier. In a 12-round repeated trust game, we examine the impact of supplier ICs and the transparency of those ICs to the buyer on buyer trusting behavior across three phases of the buyer-supplier relationship: (1) trust formation, (2) trust violation, and (3) trust repair. We find that, although a supplier’s trust violation reduces buyer trusting behavior, the least amount of damage to trusting behavior occurs for suppliers whose ICs led to supplier actions that fell marginally short of buyer expectations before the violation and when the IC was transparent to the buyer. We refer to this as the IC transparency “immunization effect.” We show that suppliers can benefit from making IC choices known to partners. Data Availability: Contact the authors. JEL Classifications: C91; D91; M41.

Exemplary Self-Discipline, Leniency towards Others: Competitive Contexts Amplify the "Black Sheep Effect" in Restoring Ingroup Trust.

Intergroup interaction, a pivotal aspect of social interaction, encompasses both cooperation and competition. Group identity significantly impacts individual behaviors and decision-making processes. This influence manifests in two contrasting ways when addressing rule-breaking by interaction partners: in-group favoritism, where individuals are more lenient towards infractions committed by in-group members, and the black sheep effect, where in-group members are penalized for their rule-breaking. Although trust is crucial in intergroup interactions, the precise impact of group identity on trust restoration and the potential moderating role of intergroup interaction types remain to be elucidated. This study presents two experiments designed to explore these dynamics. In Study 1, the manipulation of group identity through a point estimation task was utilized to evaluate its impact on intergroup trust restoration via a series of repeated trust games. Study 2 aimed to explore the moderating role of intergroup interaction on intergroup trust restoration by contrasting cooperation and competition situations. The results uncovered a "black sheep effect", where participants demonstrated a greater propensity for trust restoration with out-group members than with in-group members. This effect, however, was only evident in competitive contexts. Conversely, in cooperative contexts, the individual's trust in the in-group and out-group members is effectively repaired. These findings contribute to a deeper comprehension of trust dynamics in intergroup interactions, promoting trust establishment and repair between diverse groups, thereby boosting team collaboration efficiency and mitigating conflicts.

Cognitive and mnemonic abilities in a trust game

Individual mnemonic abilities can play an important role in determining individual choices, especially in games that involve numerous decision-making situations in which the consistency of decisions depends on the information set retained by the subjects. In similar contexts it would be useful to distinguish the impact of cognitive abilities from mnemonic abilities on choices. We provide empirical evidence on the importance of providing cumulative information flow in games of the type described above.