Laboratory trust games measure willingness to risk money on a stranger’s reciprocity

Evidence

In one well-established laboratory game, participants are randomly assigned to be a proposer (truster) or a responder (trustee). In the first step, the proposer decides how much money to forward to the responder, which gets tripled. In the second step, the responder decides how much money, if at all, to send back to the proposer. By transferring money to the responder, the proposer stands to gain, but only if the responder can be trusted to reciprocate. For example, a fully trusting proposer who starts with 10 would transfer the entire sum to the responder, which then accrues to 30. A trustworthy and fair-playing responder would then split the sum evenly and send back $15. Thus both players are rewarded with a healthy profit. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 217

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Explains the trust game protocol — the experimental design that operationalizes trust as costly investment for the reader’s framework.

Related

• Reciprocal trust creates mutual incentives for trustworthiness (similarity 0.79)