Risk mitigation and trust: Experimental Evidence from Jordan and the United States

Mohamad Al-Ississ and Iris Bohnet

Journal of Economic Psychology, 2016, vol. 53, issue C, 83-98

Abstract: This paper examines how trust and trustworthiness respond to lowering the principal’s risk in cultural settings focused on risk mitigation vs. risk prevention. We employ a binary-choice trust game and show that principals are confronted with a complex optimization problem: risk mitigation lowers the principal’s cost of betrayal but if agents are inequality averse or reciprocally minded, it can also increase its likelihood. This may be exacerbated in cultures not used to fostering trust by risk mitigation. Our experiments suggest that lowering risk only increases trust in the United States but not in Jordan. In both countries, trustworthiness decreases as the principal’s vulnerability decreases. We extend our findings to naturally occurring vulnerabilities in addition to the financial ones created in the laboratory.

Keywords: Trust; Reciprocity; Social preferences; Gender; Risk mitigation; Vulnerability; Cross-cultural experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:53:y:2016:i:c:p:83-98

DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2015.12.010

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