Background In the field of economics, the trust game (TG)—initially described as the "investment game" by Berg, Dickhaut and McCabe (1995)—is frequently applied as a behavioral measurement of trust and reciprocity. The... [ view full abstract ]
Background
In the field of economics, the trust game (TG)—initially described as the "investment game" by Berg, Dickhaut and McCabe (1995)—is frequently applied as a behavioral measurement of trust and reciprocity. The many studies using this paradigm show highly comparable results; a vast majority of the Players A is willing to trust; around two-thirds of the players are willing to trust their opponent and this trust is also reciprocated in about eighty to ninety percent of the cases. An additional beneficial aspect of the TG is that it measures not only trust, but also how trusted players react to this given trust (i.e., Player B's trustworthiness). This feature enables researchers to obtain insights on the behavioral consequences of being trusted. It appeared that many people are willing to reward appropriate behavior by reciprocating given trust. Although these insights are very valuable, note that this measurement only focuses on consequences of trust. What about distrust? How will people react to being distrust?
In its current form, the trust game—and unfortunately also the research—stops after distrust. To solve this issue we designed a trust game setting that continues after distrust. It is, however, important to note that distrust in the traditional TG equals a situation in which player B is only not offered a chance to prove his/her trustworthiness. While it is conceivable that distrusted ones will react negatively to such an event, it may be even worse when someone takes away – instead of just not offers- a chance to prove one’s trustworthiness. As important research on actions and inactions in other domains inactions reveal considerable differences in reactions towards these two events (e.g., Kahneman & Miller, 1986), we distinguished between 'inactive distrust' (i.e., not offering a chance) and 'active distrust' (i.e., taking away a chance).
Method
In the inactive distrust setting, the game we used resembled the traditional trust game. If Player A would have handed chips to player B, they would have been tripled. However, Player A in our study did not offer any chips to the participant leaving him/her being distrusted. In the active distrust setting, Player B (instead of Player A) started out having a (tripled) amount of chips and Player A could choose to let B divide these chips (i.e., decide to trust), or to divide these chips him/herself by taking the chips and therewith B’s chances to show his/her trustworthiness. The chips were then divided by 3, after which Player A could distribute the lowered amount.
Affective reactions to distrust were measured directly after. Subsequently, behavioral reactions to distrust were measured by letting the distrusted participants play a dictator game with either the initial distruster or an unrelated other.
Results
Results revealed an overall higher impact of active distrust. Although the payoff structure and the outcome of the exchange were held constant for both types of distrust, active distrust was evaluated more negatively than inactive distrust. For instance, they experienced significantly more negative emotions and evaluated the distruster as less kind and less moral. Moreover, actively distrusted participants subsequently behaved less prosocially, as evidenced by significantly lower allocations in the following dictator game. Interestingly, subsequent negative behavior was not restricted to the person responsible for the distrust; actively distrusted players allocated significantly less money to the distruster as well as to an uninvolved other, as compared to inactively distrusted players.
Conclusion
Previous research already concluded that not trusting your economic counterpart may be costly; it pays off to trust. Our study indicates that the costs of distrust may be even higher than initially expected: You may not only miss out on profits, earnings in subsequent exchanges may be negatively affected as well, especially in cases of active distrust.
