On the Interpretation of World Values Survey Trust Question: Global Expectations vs. Local Beliefs

Ritwik Banerjee

No 9872, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: How should we interpret the World Values Survey (WVS) trust question? We conduct an experiment in India, a low trust country, to correlate the WVS trust question with trust decisions in an incentivized Trust Game. Evidence supports findings from one strand of the fractured literature – the WVS trust question captures expectations about others' trustworthiness, though not always. We show that WVS trust question correlates with globally determined stable expectations but does not correlate with short term locally determined fluctuations in beliefs about trustworthiness. One implication of our study is that survey based methods may not be used to measure contextualized beliefs.

Keywords: belief; social capital; corruption; trust games (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 C92 D03 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2016-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published - published in: European Journal of Political Economy, 2018, 55, 491-510

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Related works:
Journal Article: On the interpretation of World Values Survey trust question - Global expectations vs. local beliefs (2018)
Working Paper: On the interpretation of World Values Survey trust question - global expectations vs. local beliefs (2015)
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