Effects of Expectations, Type of Relationship, and Prior Injustice on Trust Honoring: A Strategic-Experimental Approach

Abstract

Trust is essential to the conduct of social life since most interpersonal, economic, and political encounters involve giving and receiving trust. Here we took an experimental, game-theoretic approach for investigating motivational and cognitive factors affecting the reactions of trust recipients. Using the well-known trust game as workhorse, we tested the effects of variables which could moderate the behavior of the trust recipients, namely: the investor’s expectations from the trust recipient, the recipient’s types of empowerment (trust recipient vs. dictator), the recipient’s relationship with the investor (partner vs. opponent), and the type of prior injustice enacted on the trust recipient (due to misfortune vs. intended by the investor). We found that trust recipients return fair amounts of money to investors when the investors express unselfish expectations or when they have no expectations, and return low amounts when the investors express selfish expectations. We also found that in comparison to a dictator game condition, the act of trust per se caused trust recipients to return more money to investors, but this effect was significant only when the investors were portrayed as partners. Prior injustice enacted upon the recipients resulted in less than equal returns only when the act of injustice was done by the investor, but not when it resulted from mere chance. Taken together, the study’s findings demonstrate the importance of the type of “social climate” in moderating the effect of trust on the behaviors of trust recipients. We found that creating a climate of partnership could serve as a practical tool in enhancing trust, while revealing egotistic expectations could be harmful to trust building. We briefly allude to the relevance of the reported findings to intergroup and interethnic conflicts, in which conflicting groups are represented by unitary delegates.