What does it mean to trust?

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, trust implies an “assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.” Thus, it would seem that trust involves taking a risk and relying on something other than oneself. Meanwhile, being trustworthy implies that you are a person on which others can rely to reduce risks to them.  Trust and reliability are valued in society. For this reason, people often act against their best self-interest in order to be seen as trustworthy.

Behavioral economists have studied this relationship using the Trust Game. In this game, two participants are given a certain amount of money. One person (P1), the proposer, offers any fraction of this amount to the other person (P2). The experimenter increases this amount by some factor before giving it to the second person (P2). Then, P2 has to decide how much money to return to P1. In a world that has evolved based on the principles of social Darwinism and survival of the fittest, behavioral economists have theorized that if human beings place value on having more money, then according to game theory, P2 would be likely to send over no money to P1, meaning that P1 would not send any money to P2 in the first place. Trust would not be established between the two players. 

However in many experiments like those conducted by Joyce Berg and her colleagues in 1995 ("Trust, Reciprocity, and Social History”), P1 often ends up receiving more than he/she originally sent to P2. I find this fascinating! It seems that the initial proposal of an amount, the first sharing of wealth, shows P2 that someone is placing trust in him or her with the hope that he or she will not abuse this trust. Without knowing who this other person is, P2 becomes influenced by society’s values of fairness and reciprocity, and he or she acts against his or her self-interest. Essentially, he or she acts in a manner consistent with the level of trust that is placed in him or her. 

In a psychology class on consumerism, we read Robert Cialdini’s Weapons of Influence. The book outlined all the ways in which authority, social proof, scarcity, commitment and consistency, and reciprocity can play a big factor in our purchasing decisions. However, it would be interesting to see how such weapons of influence can be studied using behavioral economics games.