Is Trust Self-Fulfilling? An Experimental Study

Michael Bacharach, Gerardo A. Guerra and Daniel Zizzo

No 76, Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics

Abstract: A person is said to be `trust responsive` if she fulfils trust because she believes the truster trusts her. The experiment we report was designed to test for trust responsiveness and its robustness across payoff structures, and to disentangle it from other possible factors making for trustworthiness, including perceived kindness, perceived need, and inequality aversion. We elicit the truster`s confidence that the trustee will fulfil, and the trustee`s belief about the truster`s confidence after the trustee receives evidence relevant to this. We find evidence of strong trust responsiveness. We also find that perceptions of kindness and of need increase trust responsiveness, and that perceptions of kindness and need raise fulfilling rates only in conjunction with trust responsiveness.

Keywords: trust game; experiment; trust responsiveness; kindness; need to trust; belief elicitation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C79 C92 D84 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001-10-01
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

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