Laboratory studies lack time horizons that everyday trust requires

Evidence

All laboratory studies suffer from the fact that they are very short, and the subjects are not tied in any way whatsoever to the enduring consequences of their actions as they would be in everyday life. Rarely are experiments scheduled to last more than a couple of hours, and at most they last for no more than a couple of weeks as in, for example, the Haney, Banks, and Zimbardo (1973) study of a simulated prison. This point would obviously be very serious for any generalizations from laboratory studies where an analogue of long-term political or economic activity was being sought. Apart from brief encounters with itinerant merchants, individuals are inevitably concerned with a time scale greater than two hours. Therefore, the variation across studies in the time perspective that subjects are asked to adopt is of some interest. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 550

Categorization

• XREF: Bears directly on Saramago’s plot: blindness collapses the repeated observation that real-world trust needs, and on Zimbardo’s prison study which supplies the Hobbesian cascade. — connects to: Physics discoveries leave everyday and institutional time structures untouched. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 147
• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone studying experimental economics or the external validity of PD-lab results.