Understanding Trust

Abstract

The World Values Survey (WVS) question on trust has been widely used to study the economic effect of trust. Recent work, however, questions its validity as an accurate measure of trust by showing that it is not correlated with the sender's behaviour in the Berg et al. trust game. What measure then should we trust to measure trust? In this article, we argue that the sender's behaviour in a trust game is driven both by beliefs and by preferences. In contrast, WVS-like measures capture mostly the beliefbased component of a trust game.

Stability of experimental and survey measures of risk, time, and social preferences: A review and some new results

“…We include measures of trust (from both surveys and experiments) in our analysis of social preferences although one might argue that trust measures beliefs about others rather than an underlying social preference (Fehr, 2009; Sapienza et al, 2013). For example, if one sees that trust is going down over time, as measured either by a decrease in the amount sent in a trust game (described later) or an increase in the share of one’s village-mates one believes would take advantage if given the opportunity, this may be due to one of many different reasons.…”

The moderating role of kindness on the relation between trust and happiness

“…For this purpose, the item from the WVS was applied as a control variable. Although this measure is the subject of some methodological concerns that were addressed above, it allows for binary categorization and remains one of the most often used constructs for assessing how much trust one places in people who are not close friends or relatives (Johnson and Mislin 2012;Sapienza et al 2013). Hence, it seemed reasonable to add the WVS trust question into the study, albeit not as a main variable.…”

Trust among the Avatars: A Virtual World Experiment, with and without Textual and Visual Cues

“…A large empirical literature on trust and macroeconomic outcomes has grown up independently of the experimental trust game literature, and several scholars, including and , have investigated how, if at all, experimental behaviors correlate with the survey responses. In our post‐task survey questions, we included the generalized trust question from the World Values Survey (“Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people?”) and we also asked our subjects whether, in their opinion, “Second Life residents [are] more trustworthy, less trustworthy, or about the same as people in the general population?” While the responses are uncorrelated with first‐mover choices, they are highly correlated with the proportion of received money returned by second‐movers: Subjects who selected the trusting response to the generalized trust question and subjects who rated Second Life residents as more trustworthy were themselves more trustworthy in their decisions, mirroring closely the finding of that the trust question predicts trustworthiness but not trust .…”