The Effect of Cultural Trust on Cooperation in Two Behavioral Experiments

Abstract

Trust is an important factor for cooperation in social dilemmas because of uncertainty and free-riding fears. Many contemporary social problems are characterized by uncertainty because they depend on the cooperation of thousands to resolve. Social trust as a personal belief is necessary but not sufficient for cooperation under these conditions. In contemporary social dilemmas, the trust-cooperation relationship likely depends on cultural trust: what people believe most other people believe about the trustworthiness of people in general. I test this theory in two experimental studies. In the first, cultural trust has an effect on cooperation independent of participants’ first-order social trust. In the second, I find that if participants learn that others expect them to not believe information on the trustfulness of most other people, they will behave more or less cooperatively, depending on whether the information indicates most others’ trust is high or low. I end with a discussion of the implications my findings have for addressing social dilemmas in an era of declining social trust.

The Effect of Managerial Competencies on Employees’ Trust in the Management

“…Bauer, et al (2019) argued that individuals with a high level of generalized trust are more likely to cooperate across a wide variety of situations. This is confirmed by the study by Doyle (2021) that cultural trust affects cooperation.…”

Procedural fairness facilitates cooperative behavior by enhancing cooperative expectations

“…It should be noted, however, that one could also envisage other paths. One interesting path may be derived from recent research by Doyle (2021) on the role of cultural beliefs about trustworthiness in social dilemmas. Doyle argued that cultural beliefs may promote cooperation because people expect that others will cooperate, but also because they expect that others expect similar behavior from them (see for related ideas on higher order inferences e.g., Correll et al., 2017).…”