Trustors’ disregard for trustees deciding intuitively or reflectively: three experiments on time constraints

Antonio Cabrales, Antonio Espín, Praveen Kujal and Stephen Rassenti

No 16188, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Human decisions in the social domain are modulated by the interaction between intuitive and reflective processes. Requiring individuals to decide quickly or slowly triggers these processes and is thus likely to elicit different social behaviors. Meanwhile, time pressure has been associated with inefficiency in market settings and market regulation often requires individuals to delay their decisions via cooling-off periods. Yet, recent research suggests that people who make reflective decisions are met with distrust. If this extends to external time constraints, then forcing individuals to delay their decisions may be counterproductive in scenarios where trust considerations are important. In three Trust Game experiments (total n = 1,872), including within- and between-subjects designs, we test whether individuals trust more someone who is forced to respond quickly (intuitively) or slowly (reflectively). We find that trustors do not adjust their behavior (or their beliefs) to the trustee’s time conditions. This seems to be an appropriate response because time constraints do not affect trustees’ behavior, at least when the game decisions are binary (trust vs. don’t trust; reciprocate vs. don’t reciprocate) and therefore mistakes cannot explain choices. Thus, delayed decisions per se do not seem to elicit distrust.

Keywords: Trust; Trustworthiness; beliefs; Reflection; Dual process; Intuition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-05
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16188 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:16188

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16188

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().