Let Me Help You Help Me

Author(s):  
Joachim I. Krueger ◽  
Anthony M. Evans ◽  
Patrick R. Heck

This chapter develops the view that interpersonal trust cannot be fully understood by the lights of rational decision theory or social norms and preferences. Trust is a dilemma because the person deciding whether to trust must reconcile the conflicting demands of own well-being with the demands of prosociality. This chapter considers three types of social situation of (inter)dependence: the dictator game, which is played unilaterally, the assurance game, which is played bilaterally and simultaneously, and the trust game proper, which is played bilaterally and sequentially. Findings show that the dictator game, which models the situation of the person being trusted, is ill-suited to isolate social preferences. Empirical results may over- or underestimate the willingness to share. A simulation shows that individuals’ social preferences rarely predict the distribution of wealth. Analysis of the assurance game (or “stag hunt”) and the trust game proper yield similar results.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Margoni ◽  
Elena Nava ◽  
Luca Surian

Most cooperative interactions involve the expectation of mutual reciprocation and are based on interpersonal trust. Thus, understanding when and how humans acquire interpersonal trust can help unveiling the origins and development of children’s cooperative behavior. Here, we investigated whether prior socio-moral information about trading partners modulates the choice of preschool- (4-5 years) and school-age children (7-8 years) to share their own goods in a child-friendly version of the Trust Game. In this game, the trustee partner can repay the child’s initial investment or keep everything and betray the trustor. In two studies, we addressed whether trust is modulated by trustees exhibiting prosocial versus antisocial behaviors (Study 1, ‘helpers and hinderers’), or respect-based versus fear-based power (Study 2, ‘leaders and bullies’). Preschoolers trusted the leader more than the bully, and trusted the hinderer less than a neutral agent, but did not yet trust the helper more than the hinderer. The tendency to trust helpers more than hinderers increased with age as a result of the increased propensity to trust the prosocial agent. In Study 3, a group of preschoolers played the Dictator Game, a measure of pure generosity, with the same agents used for Study 1. Sharing rates were reliably lower than in Study 1, suggesting that the rates of investment in the trust game cannot be due solely to altruistic or indirect reciprocity motives. Overall, these findings indicate that, by age five, children understand complex cooperative exchanges and start relying on socio-moral information when deciding whom to trust.


Author(s):  
Alla Kovalenko ◽  
◽  
Albina Holovina ◽  

The article presents an analysis of the main methodological principles and schemes of social preferences experimental research, which are determined as a fundamental concept to understanding the behavior of decision-makers in the process of resolving social dilemmas. The models presented in the article include an analysis of the factors that determine social preferences. Among them are the factors of trust, reliability, reciprocity, rejection of inequality, unconditional altruism and competitive advantage. The article provides a description of the strengths and weaknesses of the classic methods for studying social preferences, which usually take the form of ultimatum game, dictator game, trust game and public goods game. The study reveals the importance of the Nash equilibrium as a way to interpret human behavior in resource allocation during the game. Analysis of numerous literary sources shows that the ultimatum game is a classic scheme for studying the altruistic behavior of people. The submission of a proposal and its acceptance is an example of Nash's ideal equilibrium. Deviation from this balance can be interpreted as altruism. In turn, the trust game is a classic scheme for studying the reciprocity and prosocial orientation. If the behavior of players deviates from Nash's equilibrium, it is interpreted as being caused by trust and reciprocity. The dictator game is a classic scheme for studying the rejection of inequality. The subject's behavior can be interpreted as a rejection of inequality or altruism, but not as a rejection of risk, as the offer of Player 1 is mandatory for Player 2. Public goods game is a classic scheme for studying the competitive orientation. Nash's ideal balance in this form of play is to do nothing for public consumption, but deviating from this rule is interpreted as altruistic behavior that is the opposite of competitive orientation. As a result, the design of psychological research is presented, which most accurately typologies the social preferences of the subjects and can contribute to the creation of a representative model of decision-making process.


Games ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 66
Author(s):  
Sanchayan Banerjee ◽  
Matteo M. Galizzi ◽  
Rafael Hortala-Vallve

Using a nationally representative sample of 1052 respondents from the United Kingdom, we systematically tested the associations between the experimental trust game and a range of popular self-reported measures for trust, such as the General Social Survey (GSS) and the Rosenberg scale for self-reported trust. We find that, in our UK representative sample, the experimental trust game significantly and positively predicts generalised self-reported trust in the GSS. This association is robust across a number of alternative empirical specifications, which account for multiple hypotheses corrections and control for other social preferences as measured by the dictator game and the public good game, as well as for a broad range of individual characteristics, such as gender, age, education, and personal income. We discuss how these results generalise to nationally representative samples from six other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (France, Germany, Italy, Korea, Slovenia, and the US).


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 183449092097475
Author(s):  
Na Zhao ◽  
Kaiqiang Xu ◽  
Ling Sun

This study examined the link between residential mobility and interpersonal trust building. Study 1 revealed a negative association between residential mobility and trust by measuring personal residential-mobility history. Study 2 demonstrated that participants who were momentarily primed with mobility showed a lower investment than participants in the control group in a trust game. The results of Study 3 showed that need for closure moderated the link between residential mobility and trust-building intention. Specifically, lower need-for-closure people had a significantly lower trust tendency in the mobility group than in the stable group. These findings illuminate the underlying influence of need for closure in the link between residential mobility and trust.


Author(s):  
Helena Bulińska-Stangrecka ◽  
Anna Bagieńska

The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the mental health of employees. Deterioration of the well-being of workers is also caused by changes in the working environment. Remote working can affect both social interactions and job satisfaction. The purpose of the study is to examine what factors influence job satisfaction in the context of remote work caused by a pandemic. The study analyses whether employee relations and interpersonal trust are related to the level of perceived job satisfaction. The investigation started with a literature review and then research hypotheses have been formulated. Based on an empirical study, carried out on a sample of 220 IT employees during the pandemic, an analysis of the mediating role of trust in links between employee relations and perceived job satisfaction was conducted. The current study found that positive employee relations contribute to the level of job satisfaction. Additionally, trust is an important factor that mediates these relationships. Based on the results of the research, it was possible to describe the mechanism of shaping a supportive work environment during a pandemic.


2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan E. Carlin ◽  
Gregory J. Love

How does democratic politics inform the interdisciplinary debate on the evolution of human co-operation and the social preferences (for example, trust, altruism and reciprocity) that support it? This article advances a theory of partisan trust discrimination in electoral democracies based on social identity, cognitive heuristics and interparty competition. Evidence from behavioral experiments in eight democracies show ‘trust gaps’ between co- and rival partisans are ubiquitous, and larger than trust gaps based on the social identities that undergird the party system. A natural experiment found that partisan trust gaps in the United States disappeared immediately following the killing of Osama bin Laden. But observational data indicate that partisan trust gaps track with perceptions of party polarization in all eight cases. Finally, the effects of partisanship on trust outstrip minimal group treatments, yet minimal-group effects are on par with the effects of most treatments for ascriptive characteristics in the literature. In sum, these findings suggest political competition dramatically shapes the salience of partisanship in interpersonal trust, the foundation of co-operation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H.B. McAuliffe ◽  
Daniel E. Forster ◽  
Eric J. Pedersen ◽  
Michael E. McCullough

The Dictator Game, a face valid measure of altruism, and the Trust Game, a face valid measure of trust and trustworthiness, are among the most widely used behavioural measures in human cooperation research. Researchers have observed considerable covariation among these and other economic games, leading them to assert that there exists a general human propensity to cooperate that varies in strength across individuals and manifests itself across a variety of social settings. To formalize this hypothesis, we created an S–1 bifactor model using 276 participants’ Dictator Game and Trust Game decisions. The general factor had significant, moderate associations with self–reported and peer–reported altruism, trust, and trustworthiness. Thus, the positive covariation among economic games is not reducible to the games’ shared situational features. Two hundred participants returned for a second session. The general factor based on Dictator Game and Trust Game decisions from this session did not significantly predict self–reported and peer–reported cooperation, suggesting that experience with economic games causes them to measure different traits from those that are reflected in self–assessments and peer–assessments of cooperativeness. © 2018 European Association of Personality Psychology


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben M Tappin ◽  
Valerio Capraro

Prosociality is fundamental to human social life, and, accordingly, much research has attempted to explain human prosocial behavior. Capraro and Rand (Judgment and Decision Making, 13, 99-111, 2018) recently provided experimental evidence that prosociality in anonymous, one-shot interactions (such as Prisoner’s Dilemma and Dictator Game experiments) is not driven by outcome-based social preferences – as classically assumed – but by a generalized morality preference for “doing the right thing”. Here we argue that the key experiments reported in Capraro and Rand (2018) comprise prominent methodological confounds and open questions that bear on influential psychological theory. Specifically, their design confounds: (i) preferences for efficiency with self-interest; and (ii) preferences for action with preferences for morality. Furthermore, their design fails to dissociate the preference to do “good” from the preference to avoid doing “bad”. We thus designed and conducted a preregistered, refined and extended test of the morality preference hypothesis (N=801). Consistent with this hypothesis, our findings indicate that prosociality in the anonymous, one-shot Dictator Game is driven by preferences for doing the morally right thing. Inconsistent with influential psychological theory, however, our results suggest the preference to do “good” was as potent as the preference to avoid doing “bad” in this case.


Complexity ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Hao Ding ◽  
Feng Xu ◽  
Jia-Ming Zhu

In the present research, based on the game research paradigm, the research tools are the dictator game and the trust game, and the research objects are Chinese university students. We adopt 2(self-social class: high, low) × 2(target social class: high, low) between-subjects design experiment to investigate the influence of social class on university students’ prosocial behavior. Across the experimental study, we find that (1) in the two situations of dictator game and trust game, self-social class has no significant influence on university students’ prosocial behavior; (2) in the situation of dictator game, target social class has a significant influence on university students’ prosocial behavior, and it is regulated by self-social class. Under the condition of low self-social class, the higher the target social class, the more prosocial behavior of university students, which confirms the perspective of status and negates “if you are poor, you will be good for yourself.” Under the condition of high self-social class, the lower the target social class, the more prosocial the behavior of university students, which confirms the perspective of fairness and echoes “if you are good, you will be good at the world”; (3) in the context of the trust game, target social class has a significant influence on university students’ prosocial behavior, and there is no interaction effect with self-social class.


2021 ◽  
pp. 139-158
Author(s):  
Christopher Dye

Despite thousands of years of toilet culture and technology, and despite the obvious benefits of sanitation for health and well-being, the great majority of people alive today do not have access to a safe system for removing human waste. The installation of safe sanitary systems depends on cooperation among many kinds of providers and users. Their collective goal is to align the benefits for health with personal and social preferences for toilet use and hygiene, while exploiting other benefits from agriculture, energy, education, environmental protection, housing, and flood protection. For individuals, families, and communities, toilets are not merely, or even mainly, to protect health. Rather, their acceptability hinges on convenience, privacy, personal safety, and dignity, where preferences are rooted in societal norms. Providing safe sanitation for all is not merely a health intervention: it is one of the mutually reinforcing processes of cultural, social, and economic development.


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