scholarly journals Testing the Trust Game with undergraduates: An experiment with wealth heterogeneity

Author(s):  
Amalia Rodrigo-González ◽  
Maria Caballer-Tarazona ◽  
Aurora García-Gallego

Trust, reciprocity and a fair distribution of resources are cruzial in the sustainabhility of any economic system. As a matter of fact, those are values that should be promoted among the new generations, especially among university students enroled indegrees tha are related to economics.Under this context, we are interested in enhancing criticism and active reflectionamong undergraduates with respect to social values. With  such a goal in mind, we design a two step classroom task that includes playing the Trust Game (TG) in the first place and, second, a discussion activity.This paper is an ext5ension of Caballer-Tarazona et al. (2016) with a novelty: A new treatment is introduced in which subjects have information about the cumulated wealth of their partners.As a complement of the educational propose of the task, data collected during the experiment has been used to test the three hypotheses on trust and reciprocity among students.Two main result emerge: First, information has no effect on trust and reciprocity decisions. And second, in median, a gender effect in such decision is found.

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (16) ◽  
pp. 4399 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amalia Rodrigo-González ◽  
María Caballer-Tarazona ◽  
Aurora García-Gallego

We propose a teaching activity aimed at promoting social values, such as trust and reciprocity, among undergraduate students in economics and related degrees. We present our pilot experience of what we call RED–‘Reading–Experiment–Discussion’, a three-step activity as part of a class of a specific module at the University of Valencia. During the Reading step, we encourage students to reflect, learn, and critically think about social values. In the second step, Experiment, students make decisions in a trust game experiment, a game created to measure trust and reciprocity in economic environments. Students then give opinions through a post-experiment questionnaire. Our research hypotheses are tested by using non-parametric methods. We also investigate the association between students’ decisions and their attitudinal and sociodemographic characteristics by linear regression analysis. Experimental data show that decisions on trust and reciprocity are dependent on earnings information and that, on average, females trust more than males. Finally, in the Discussion step, the learning is reinforced by sharing the readings about morals and the experimental decisions. In short, RED may be of great help in transmitting to students the role of social preferences in individual decision making.


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.


Author(s):  
Sergio Lo Iacono ◽  
Burak Sonmez

Abstract Trusting and trustworthy environments are argued to promote collective action, as people learn to rely on their fellow citizens and believe that only few individuals will free ride. To test the causal validity of this mechanism, we propose an experimental design that allows us to create different trusting and trustworthy conditions simply by (i) manipulating the incentive structure of an iterated binary trust game and (ii) allowing information to flow among participants. Findings indicate that, given a similar distribution of resources among subjects, trusting and trustworthy environments strongly foster the provision of public goods. This outcome is largely driven by a learning effect: subjects transfer what they assimilate during a sequence of dyadic exchanges to their decision to act for the collectivity. In particular, results showed that what we learn from the community has a relevant effect on our ability to overcome the free-rider problem: we are more likely to act for the collectivity when we learn from the community to be trustful or reliable in our one-to-one interactions. The same applies in the opposite direction: we are more prone to free ride when we learn from the environment to be distrustful or unreliable in our dyadic exchanges.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. e0155962 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evgenia Christoforou ◽  
Antonio Fernández Anta ◽  
Agustín Santos

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (6) ◽  
pp. 1041-1046 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Bell ◽  
Benjamin Robinson ◽  
Cornelius Katona ◽  
Anne-Kathrin Fett ◽  
Sukhi Shergill

AbstractBackgroundTrauma due to deliberate harm by others is known to increase the likelihood of developing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This is the first study investigating basic and dynamic trust in ‘interpersonal’ PTSD.MethodsThirty-two participants with PTSD and 22 healthy controls played a novel multi-round version of a monetary investment protocol, the so-called ‘Trust Game’, a task from the behavioural economics literature, which is considered to involve trust and reciprocity. We used two ‘Trust Games’ including cooperative and unfair partners.ResultsFindings showed an effect for lower basic investment in PTSD compared to healthy controls, that trended towards significance (p = 0.09). All participants showed behavioural flexibility and modified their trust based on behavioural cues from their cooperative and unfair game partners. However, participants with PTSD made significantly lower investments towards the cooperative partner than controls. Investments towards the unfair partner did not differ between groups. Higher trauma scores were associated with lower levels of trust-related investments towards the cooperative but not the unfair game partner.ConclusionThe association between reduced trust towards cooperative others in individuals who experienced interpersonal trauma could indicate acquired insensitivity to social rewards or inflexible negative beliefs about others as a sequel of the traumatic experience, which increases in a dose response relationship with the severity of the trauma. A specific focus on cooperation and trusting behaviour could provide a treatment target for future cognitive and pharmacological interventions.


2019 ◽  
pp. 088626051988152
Author(s):  
Kyrie Sellnow ◽  
Karyn Esbensen ◽  
Josh M. Cisler

Trauma research has traditionally focused on altered emotion regulation and its role in psychopathology, whereas mechanisms of social behavior remain comparatively unexplored, particularly among adolescents. It has been previously reported that adolescents with histories of interpersonal violence (IV) demonstrate disrupted social learning, and the degree to which they are impaired during social interactions requiring trustful behaviors may be associated with their levels of anxiety. In the present study, 52 adolescent females ( n = 26 control; n = 26 IV-exposed) between ages of 11 and 17 completed a multi-round adaptation of the Trust Game in which they interacted with a confederate peer run by a computer program, alternating between the roles of investor and investee. The task was designed to operationalize the social behaviors of trust and trust reciprocity, where the magnitude of the participants’ monetary investment in the confederate during the investor role represented trust while the proportion of investment returned to the confederate in the investee role represented trust reciprocity. IV-exposed and control participants did not differ in trust (i.e., as investors); however, IV-exposed participants without anxiety diagnoses demonstrated lower trust than those with anxiety diagnoses. For trust reciprocity (i.e., as investees), there were again no differences between IV-exposed participants and controls; however, IV-exposed participants with anxiety diagnoses had increased trust reciprocity compared with both other groups. Similarly, caregiver-reported anxiety symptoms were associated with trust reciprocity behaviors among the IV-exposed adolescents. Findings suggest that IV exposure and associated anxiety impacts adolescents’ trust behaviors, demonstrating potential mechanisms for maladaptive social behavior among trauma-exposed youth.


2015 ◽  
Vol 105 (5) ◽  
pp. 621-624 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolina Castilla

I present results from the first trust game conducted among married couples. The experiment consisted of a one-shot trust game where spouses were taken into separate rooms, not allowed to communicate, given a significant endowment, and both strategies and payoffs were common knowledge. Results indicate that only 3 percent of spouses in the sender role transfer the entire amount; the average proportion sent is 57 percent of the endowment. The limited sending is costly because the household on average is walking away with half of the potential earnings. The results provide further evidence of the lack of Pareto Efficiency within the household.


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.


Author(s):  
Kiyotaka Yageta

AbstractFace-to-face communication increases human trust, which is crucial for making important decisions with others. Due to technological breakthroughs and the COVID-19 pandemic, human interactions now predominantly occur online, leading to two situations: other peoples’ faces cannot be seen, but yours can, and vice versa. However, the relationships among watching, being watched, and face-to-face interaction are unclear in existing papers. This paper separately measures the effects of both watching and being watched on human interactions using a trust game. I derive the optimal behaviors of senders and receivers in the trust game and empirically validate it through a controlled experiment. The results show that more than half of the participants perform the optimal behavior. They also indicate that both watching and being watched enhance human trust and reciprocity, while the synergy effect of face-to-face is not observed. Additionally, women reciprocate more when they are watched, and trust increases when participants are paired with the opposite gender and can watch their partner. This paper theoretically concludes that the former comes from women’s social pressure that they should be reciprocators, and the latter from participants’ beliefs that the opposite gender reciprocates more than the same gender does. These results propose a framework based on watching and being watched affecting human behaviors and emphasize the importance of face-to-face communication in online human interactions.


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