Trust, Beliefs and Cooperation: Excavating a Foundation of Strong Economies
通过实验室实验，发现人们会从可信赖行为推断合作性，并据此调整自己的合作水平；信任与可信赖行为都能引发类似的推断，且条件合作比内疚厌恶更能解释贡献行为。
One reason trust is positively correlated with standard of living across societies may be that people treat trustworthiness in sequential social dilemmas as a sign that others will also cooperate in simultaneous collective action problems, and trust tends to correlate with trustworthiness. Trustworthiness and cooperation may both reflect the same disposition: reciprocity. Whether trust itself predicts cooperation is less clear, a priori. We conduct a laboratory experiment and find that subjects infer cooperativeness from trustworthiness and on average cooperate more when they predict others to be more cooperative. A novel result is that subjects make the same inferences from trusting as from trustworthiness. We find that subjects’ priors entail considerable heterogeneity of trustworthiness, trust and cooperation within the population. Finally, conditional cooperation explains contributions better than guilt aversion, in our data.