Trust game, survey trust, are they correlated? Evidence from China

Abstract

Trust Game and survey trust are the two most popular measurements in the field of trust research, but most studies conducted in developing countries have found low or even insignificant correlations between them, we therefore validated this phenomenon in the cultural context of the largest developing country, China. Within-country differences can be of the same magnitude as the between country differences, especially in a culturally diverse China. Thus, we focus on comparing the characteristics of trust in the South and North regions of China. Through zero-order correlation and hierarchical regression analysis, our findings are consistent with those of numerous developing countries: Trust Game is lowly correlated with in-group trust survey and not with out-group trust survey. On the other hand, we found that Chinese individuals exhibit a distinct pattern of in-group trust, and there is no fundamental difference in the characteristics of trust between the South and the North.