Facilitating achievement by social capital in Japan

Social capital, as a comprehensive concept, comprises structural components representing social networks and functional components, which register past and future help, reciprocity, and trust. One assumption is that these various components interact and reinforce one another to enhance an individual's expected achievement. To validate the conceptualization and examine the consequences of social capital, the present study analyzed a set of data collected from 201 residents based in Japan. The results demonstrated that conceptualization proves to be valid in view of its adequacy in internal consistency and stability in the confirmatory factor model. The structural equation modeling likewise revealed contributions of the social capital components both individually and interactively. Notably, the Japanese respondents expected greater achievement with higher levels of both structural social capital and anticipatory functional social capital, which consequently tapped expected help, trust, and reciprocity. Structural social capital appeared to be a basis for functional social capital.     

Trust and reciprocity among international groups: Experimental evidence from Austria and Japan

This paper explores national identity in trust and reciprocity at the intra- and international levels by adopting a modified trust game played among groups from Austria and Japan, wherein subjects play the roles of trustor and trustee consecutively without any information feedback. Although the intranational trust levels in both countries are identical, the international trust for Japanese groups is less than that of Austrian groups. On the other hand, the international reciprocity for Japanese groups is greater than that of Austrian groups. Additionally, the Japanese reciprocation level toward Austrians is higher than that toward Japanese.     

IS THERE RECIPROCITY IN A RECIPROCAL‐EXCHANGE ECONOMY? EVIDENCE OF GENDERED NORMS FROM A SLUM IN NAIROBI,KENYA

Norms of reciprocity help enforce cooperative agreements in bilateral sequential exchange. We examine the norms that apply in a reciprocal-exchange economy. In our one-shot investment game in a Nairobi slum, people adhered to the norm of "balanced reciprocity," which obligates quid-pro-quo returns for any level of trust. The norm is gendered, with people more likely to comply when confronted with women rather than men, and differs from "conditional reciprocity," prevalent in developed countries, according to which greater trust is rewarded with proportionally larger returns. Balanced reciprocity produces less trust and trustworthiness and smaller gains from trade than conditional reciprocity. ( JEL C72, C91)     

TRUST,RECIPROCITY, AND RULES

Many economic interactions rely on trust and trust violations can have serious economic consequences. Simple minimum standard rules are attractive because they prevent egregious trust violations. However, they may undermine more trusting and reciprocal (trustworthy) behavior that otherwise would have occurred, leading to worse outcomes. In an experimental trust game, we test the efficacy of exogenously imposed minimum standard rules. Rules damage trust and reciprocity, reducing economic welfare. While sufficiently restrictive rules restore welfare, trust and reciprocity never return. Results indicate that participants are concerned about payoffs while also using the game to learn about trust and trustworthiness of others. (JEL C72, C90, D63, D64, L51)     

What’s in a frame? Goal framing,trust and reciprocity

Economists often rely on the Berg et al. (1995) trust game, or variants thereof, to identify levels of trust and reciprocity, which are fundamental to discussions of social capital. But to what extent is behavior in this game sensitive to the way the instructions are framed? We use the Berg et al. trust game played for ten rounds with random re-matching to study this. We implement a number of variations in the way the game is presented to subjects. We show that levels of trust, reciprocity and returns to trust are significantly higher under “goal framing”, which highlights the conflict inherent in the game, between self-interest and maximizing social surplus. Furthermore, with such framing, trust measured via the experimental game exhibits significant positive correlation with trust measured via the Social Values Orientation questionnaire.     

REPRESENTATIVE TRUST AND RECIPROCITY: PREVALENCE AND DETERMINANTS

This paper provides evidence about the determinants of trust and reciprocal inclinations, that is, a tendency for people to respond in kind to hostile or kind actions, in a representative setting. We investigate the prevalence of reciprocity in the population, the correlation between trust and positive and negative reciprocal inclinations within person, the individual determinants of reciprocity, and the relationship with psychological measures of personality. We find that most people state reciprocal inclinations, in particular in terms of positive reciprocity, as well as substantial heterogeneity in the degree of trust and reciprocity. Trust and positive reciprocity are only weakly correlated, while trust and negative reciprocity exhibit a negative correlation. In terms of determinants, being female and increasing age are associated with stronger positive and weaker negative reciprocal tendencies. Taller people are more positively reciprocal, but height has no impact on negative reciprocity. Psychological traits also affect trust and reciprocity. ( JEL D63, J3, J6)     

Developmental Changes and Individual Differences in Trust and Reciprocity in Adolescence

A Trust Game was used to examine trust and reciprocity development in 12–18‐year‐old‐adolescents (N = 496), as findings have been conflicting and transitions in adolescence remain elusive. Furthermore, this study tested the roles of gender, risk, and individual differences in empathy, impulsivity, and antisocial tendencies in trust and reciprocity. Results indicate stability in trust and a decrease in reciprocity across adolescence, but also show that trust and reciprocity choices were influenced by risk, and that empathy mediated the age‐related decrease in reciprocity. Males trusted more than females, but there were no gender differences in reciprocity. These findings highlight the importance of considering individual differences and adolescents’ sensitivities to varying contexts in explaining trust and reciprocity development in adolescence.     

‘We,the Congolese,we cannot trust each other’. Trust,norms and relations among traders in Katanga,Democratic Republic of Congo1

Congolese traders in Katanga claim that they cannot trust their peers, customers, and employees. Existing literature about social capital in Africa does not enhance our understanding, as it tends to consider trust as depending on the degree of social knowledge. In the Congo, social proximity does not exclude suspicion, nor does social distance necessarily prevent trust. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article aims at developing a more detailed framework. It studies how Congolese traders negotiate two key norms for the building of economic trust – property and reciprocity – with non‐relatives, distant relatives, and close relatives.     

Adolescents' trust and reciprocity toward friends,unknown peers,and community members

Using a newly developed version of the Trust Game among 196 adolescents aged 11–20 years, this study examined whether adolescents distinguish between trust and reciprocity to unknown peers, friends, and community members. We also tested for effects of age, gender, and individual differences in attending to others' emotions, emotional support to friends, societal contributions, and institutional and interpersonal trust beliefs. Results indicated that adolescents showed the least trust and reciprocity to unknown peers, more to a community member, and most to friends. Reciprocity increased with age, and individual differences in societal contributions and interpersonal trust were positively related to trust and reciprocity. This study was the first to show that community members are a specific target in adolescents' social world.     

Working For Tips: an Examination of Trust and Reciprocity in A Secondary Relationship of the Restaurant Organization*

This study reports on the operation of trust and reciprocity in a secondary relationship of the restaurant organization. Working for tips rather than contract wages, the waitress is required to trust the customer and depend on the rule of reciprocity for her wages. Each restaurant customer is extended credit or trust during the service interaction. The restaurant worker develops a disposition or attitude towards this act of credit. The question for investigation is which conditions, structural or interactional, exert the greatest influence on the credit attitude expressed by the waitress? The table service staff of eight restaurants serve as the sample. When both models are tested, only the structural conditions exert a significant influence on the credit attitude. Findings suggest that acts of trust and reciprocity are influenced more by the climate or orientation of the employing organization than by conditions of work interaction.     

Patients' trust and the quality of physicians

Patients are uncertain of physicians' quality but learn about the quality of particular physicians through experience in treatment. Patients come to trust physicians who have served them well. This paper explores the economic consequences of patients' learning and trust within a model of the market for physicians' services. In a market equilibrium, there are too many incompetent physicians in practice. Surprisingly, even the more competent physicians have an interest in preventing patients from judging quality except through experience. As we show, all physicians, including the most competent, may oppose steps to inform patients of physicians' quality.     

Does players’ identification affect trust and reciprocity in the lab?

Reputation mechanisms are mainly based on information sharing by traders about private trading experience. Each trader can therefore rely on his own past experience as a trader and on other traders’ past experience. The former is the direct component of the reputation mechanism and the latter the indirect component ( [Bolton et al., 2004a] and [Bolton et al., 2004b]). We design an experiment for isolating the direct component of the reputation system and studying its effect on the level of trust and reciprocity in a population where agents play both roles (trustor and trustee). Our experiment consists on three treatments of a finitely repeated investment game (Berg, Dickhaut, & McCabe, 1995). In the reference treatment there is no reputation mechanism at all, in treatment 1 trustees can build up a direct reputation, and in treatment two players can build up a direct reputation for both roles. We find that trustees’ direct reputation has a positive effect on reciprocity, but does not affect the average trust in the population. Trust is significantly higher only when players can build up a reputation in both roles. We show that the increase in trust is mainly linked to the formation of mutual trust-reciprocity relations.     

Trust in humans and robots: Economically similar but emotionally different

Trust-based interactions with robots are increasingly common in the marketplace, workplace, on the road, and in the home. However, a valid concern is that people may not trust robots as they do humans. While trust in fellow humans has been studied extensively, little is known about how people extend trust to robots. Here we compare trust-based investments and self-reported emotions from across three nearly identical economic games: human-human trust games, human-robot trust games, and human-robot trust games where the robot decision impacts another human. Robots in our experiment mimic humans: they are programmed to make reciprocity decisions based on previously observed behaviors by humans in analogous situations. We find that people invest similarly in humans and robots. By contrast the social emotions (i.e., gratitude, anger, pride, guilt) elicited by the interactions (but not the non-social emotions) differed across human and robot trust games. Emotional reactions depended on the trust game interaction, and how another person was affected.     

Believe it when you see it: Dyadic embeddedness and reputation effects on trust in cryptomarkets for illegal drugs

Large-scale online marketplace data have been repeatedly used to test sociological theories on trust between strangers. Most studies focus on sellers’ aggregate reputation scores, rather than on buyers’ individual decisions to trust. Theoretical predictions on how repeated exchanges affect trust within dyads and how buyers weigh individual experience against reputation feedback from other actors have not been tested directly in detail. What do buyers do when they are warned not to trust someone they have trusted many times before? We analyze reputation effects on trust at the dyadic and network levels using data from an illegal online drug marketplace. We find that buyers’ trust decisions are primarily explained by dyadic embeddedness - cooperative sellers get awarded by repeated exchanges. Although buyers take third-party information into account, this effect is weaker and more important for first-time buyers. Buyers tend to choose market exit instead of retaliation against sellers after negative experiences.     

Reputational cues in repeated trust games

The importance of reputation in human societies is highlighted both by theoretical models and empirical studies. In this paper, we have extended the scope of previous experimental studies based on trust games by creating treatments where players can rate their opponents’ behavior and know their past ratings. Our results showed that being rated by other players and letting this rating be known are factors that increase cooperation levels even when rational reputational investment motives are ruled out. More generally, subjects tended to respond to reputational opportunities even when this was neither rational nor explainable by reciprocity.     

Carry a big stick,or no stick at all: Punishment and endowment heterogeneity in the trust game

We investigate the effect of costly punishment in a trust game with endowment heterogeneity. Our findings indicate that the difference between the investor and the allocator’s initial endowments determines the effect of punishment on trust and trustworthiness. Punishment fosters trust only when the investor is wealthier than the allocator. Otherwise, punishment fails to promote trusting behavior. As for trustworthiness, the effect is just the opposite. The higher the difference between the investor and the allocator’s initial endowments, the less willing allocators are to pay back. We discuss the consistency of our findings with social preference models (like inequality aversion, reciprocity), the capacity of punishment (i.e., the deterrence hypothesis) and hidden costs of punishment (i.e., models of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation). Our results are hardly coherent with the first two (inequality aversion and deterrence), but roughly consistent with the latter.     

“Trust Me”: Differences in expressed and perceived trust relations in an organization

The possibility of resolving the tension between trust as a psychological condition and trust as a general organizing principle depends on assumptions about the convergence of expressed and perceived trust relations. In empirical organizational research these assumptions are frequently left implicit and only rarely modeled directly. Using data that we have collected on trust relations within the top management team of a multiunit industrial group we specify and estimate multivariate exponential random graph models (ERGMs) that reveal important differences in the structural logics underlying networks of expressed and perceived trust relations. Results confirm that trust induces awareness and produces expectations of reciprocity – features that are consistent with the view of trust as a general organizing principle. Results also show that networks of perceived trust relations are characterized by tendencies toward reciprocity and generalized giving of trust. When multivariate network effects are introduced, however, expressed trust relations no longer show a significant tendency toward reciprocation. Interpreted together these results suggest that: (i) the distribution of expressed and perceived trust relations differs; (ii) expressed trust relations in organizations are more hierarchical than are perceived trust relations, and (iii) expressed and perceived trust relations need to be modeled jointly. These findings suggest caution in the adoption and interpretation of trust only as a general organizing principle, and suggest that psychological mechanisms also play an important role in the making and breaking of trust relations within organizations.     

Negotiating the Unknown: The Role of Uncertainty in Social Exchange

This article documents the role of uncertainty in social exchange. Specifically, it reviews how social exchange theorists incorporate uncertainty when explaining psychological processes and social behaviors. After identifying and examining the structural roots of uncertainty, the article addresses how uncertainty affects actor behavior and attitude formation, from curbing power use to promoting the development of more committed, trusting and cohesive exchange partnerships. By assessing the consequences of uncertainty and risk for social exchange, this article contributes to sociological knowledge about the nature and form of relationships in an uncertain world.     

Understanding public perceptions of genetically modified organisms in China: The role that heuristics play during digital media exposure

This study explicates the role that heuristics play in influencing Chinese public perceptions of genetically modified organisms (GMO) when they are exposed to digital media. According to the cognitive–affective continuum of heuristics, trust in scientists and negative emotions about GMOs are a cognition-oriented heuristic and an affect heuristic, respectively. The statistical results of an online survey (N?=?414) demonstrated that trust in scientists fully mediated digital media exposure and perceptions of the risks versus benefits of GMOs. In addition, negative emotions moderated the full mediation effect, showing that the indirect effect was stronger in individuals with low levels of negative emotions than in those with high levels of negative emotions. The mediating role of trust in scientists and the moderating role of negative emotions, the two heuristics applied in this study, indicated that when negative emotions were weak, laypeople were more likely to rely on scientists to judge the consequences of GMOs than systematically process the associated information by themselves. The findings have implications for reconsidering the importance of heuristic processing in building reasonable public perceptions of risk-laden technologies through the digital environment.     

Trust,Social Capital,and the Coordination of Relationships Between the Members of Cooperatives: A Comparison Between Member-Focused Cooperatives and Third-Party-Focused Cooperatives

In recent years, nonprofit scholars have increasingly studied the phenomenon of social enterprises which has become a generic term describing a wider reorientation among third sector organizations. The emergence of social enterprises has also led to a dynamic of hybridization and broadening in the cooperative sector, similar to an earlier dynamic of “economization”, but this time on the other end of the organizational spectrum. This paper aims at developing a fine-grained conceptual understanding of how this organizational dynamic is shaped in terms of member coordination, thus contributing to a more comprehensive theoretical understanding of different organizational forms of cooperatives. Specifically, to highlight the difference to traditional member-focused cooperatives, the paper introduces the term third-party-focused cooperatives for those social enterprises which emphasize economic goals as well as control and ownership by a particular community (typically place-based). The key result of the paper is that with the shift from member- to community-focus in cooperatives, the main coordination mechanism becomes one of norm-based trust on the basis of generalized reciprocity. In contrast to traditional maxim-based trust member coordination on the basis of relation-specific reciprocity, this enables third-party-focused cooperatives to mobilize bridging and linking social capital, facilitating collective action aimed towards the community interest. The findings suggest that this identity shift requires a mutual re-positioning between the cooperative and the nonprofit sector, in terms of umbrellas as well as regulatory and legislative bodies.