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Theory and Decision (2007) 63:349388 Springer 2007
MICHAEL BACHARACH, GERARDO GUERRA and DANIEL JOHN ZIZZO
DOI 10.1007/s11238-007-9043-5
THE SELF-FULFILLING PROPERTY OF TRUST:
AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY
ABSTRACT. A person is said to be trust responsive if she fulls trust because she believes the truster trusts her. The experiment we report was designed to test for trust responsiveness and its robustness across payoff structures, and to discriminate it from other possible factors making for trustworthiness, including perceived kindness, perceived need and inequality aversion. We elicit the trusters condence that the trustee will full, and the trustees belief about the trusters condence after the trustee receives evidence relevant to this. We nd evidence of strong trust responsiveness. We also nd that perceptions of kindness and of need increase trust responsiveness, and that they do so only in conjunction with trust responsiveness.
KEY WORDS: trust, trust responsiveness, kindness, need to trust, belief elicitation
JEL CLASSIFICATION CODES: C72, C92, D84
1. INTRODUCTION
Today few doubt the importance of trust and trustworthiness as explanatory factors in economic behaviour. It is also held that they are fundamental to economic welfare: they allow saving on the costs of writing, policing and enforcing contracts, and are even preconditions for the existence of markets. They explain the prevalence of honesty in making social security claims, the custom in restaurants of serving rst and charging afterwards, unmonitored time-based payment schemes, and the general acceptance of informal promises in trade. They constitute a good proportion of the social capital. But despite the centrality of trust and trustworthiness
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in economic activity, and despite the widespread recognition today of their centrality, there remains much mystication about what produces them, and even about what trust is.
Like their cousin, cooperativeness, the T-pair trust and trustworthiness have proved hard to accommodate in the framework of rational decision theory (Hollis, 1998). This has led some to denigrate them as irrational, however socially benecial they might be. Others (Hardin, 1991) have sought to rationalize the T-pair, typically as strategies in repeated interactions. Yet others have explained them as the product of motivational traits that are neither rational nor irrational (Bacharach and Gambetta, 2001a). One example of this last view is the suggestion that trustworthiness can be produced by...