Does community social embeddedness promote generalized trust? An experimental test of the spillover effect

Abstract

Despite the theoretical relevance attributed to the spillover effect, little empirical research has focused on testing its causal validity. Addressing this gap in the literature, I propose a novel experimental design to test if the overall density of social links in a community promotes trustworthy and trusting behaviors with absolute strangers. Controlling for social integration (i.e. the individual number of social connections), I found that density fosters higher levels of trust. In particular, results show that people in denser communities are more likely to trust their unknown fellow citizens, encouraging isolated subjects to engage with strangers. However, evidence did not support the idea that community social embeddedness causes an increase of trustworthiness, indicating that the spillover effect works only with respect to trust.

An Empirical Comparison of Four Generalized Trust Scales: Test-Retest Reliability, Measurement Invariance, Predictive Validity, and Replicability

“…In the investment game, a measure of generalized trust should thus be correlated with behavioral trust (proportion of tokens sent) and uncorrelated with behavioral trustworthiness (proportion of tokens returned). While the prior literature yields mixed results, the most-people trust question and other generalized trust scales have been shown to correlate with behavioral trust (Lo Iacono 2018;Fehr et al 2002;Naef and Schupp 2009;Sapienza et al 2013) and trustworthiness (Ashraf et al 2006;Glaeser et al 2000;Sapienza et al 2013), which questions the validity of these measures. In the present article, only SFT meets the criteria laid out for predictive validity: it is positively correlated with behavioral trust and weakly correlated with behavioral trustworthiness.…”

“…Third, the criterion validity of common generalized trust measures is well known (Bauer et al 2019;Paxton and Glanville 2015;Robbins 2016aRobbins , 2019, especially their ability to predict behavior in economic games (Fehr et al 2002;Gachter et al 2004;Lo Iacono 2018;Peysakhovich et al 2014;Sapienza et al 2013). Although Robbins (2019) reveals that SFT and IST exhibit strong concurrent validity, the extent to which SFT/IST predicts cooperation remains unknown.…”

Mapping societal trust and trust in negotiations

“…We propose that societal trust is positively associated with individuals' social perceptions of attitudinal trust in negotiations. The rationale is that generalized, context-free trust can spill over to particularistic, context-specific trust (Lo Iacono, 2018;Nee et al, 2018). The spillover effect can function in two interrelated manners: increasing people's positive expectations of others and alleviating people's concerns for their own vulnerabilities.…”

Civic Participation and Social Embeddedness: Differences Between Urban and Rural Communities

“…Statistically, the sub-national level offers the opportunity to broaden the focus of the analysis and to examine the relationship between regional civic participation and individual embeddedness on a greater number of context units, increasing the reliability of the estimates (Meuleman & Billiet, 2009). It also allows controlling for country-level effects (Beugelsdijk & Klasing, 2016; Kestilä & Söderlund, 2007).…”