Trustworthiness is a social norm, but trusting is not

Trustworthiness is a social norm, but trusting is not

Cristina Bicchieri cb36@sas.upenn.edu
University of Pennsylvania, USA
Erte Xiao
Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Ryan Muldoon
University of Western Ontario, Canada
Abstract

Previous literature has demonstrated the important role that trust plays in developing and maintaining well-functioning societies. However, if we are to learn how to increase levels of trust in society, we must first understand why people choose to trust others. One potential answer to this is that people view trust as normative: there is a social norm for trusting that imposes punishment for noncompliance. To test this, we report data from a survey with salient rewards to elicit people’s attitudes regarding the punishment of distrusting behavior in a trust game. Our results show that people do not behave as though trust is a norm. Our participants expected that most people would not punish untrusting investors, regardless of whether the potential trustee was a stranger or a friend. In contrast, our participants behaved as though being trustworthy is a norm. Most participants believed that most people would punish someone who failed to reciprocate a stranger’s or a friend’s trust. We conclude that, while we were able to reproduce previous results establishing that there is a norm of reciprocity, we found no evidence for a corresponding norm of trust, even among friends.

Politics, Philosophy & Economics January 31, 2011 1470594X10387260, first published on January 31, 2011 doi:10.1177/1470594X10387260