On the benefits and boundaries of trust and trustworthiness

Abstract

Trust is ‘the glue or social lubricant that binds people together’. This refers to the importance and benefits of not only giving trust, but also of honoring trust. Previous meta-analyses on trust games (Berg et al., 1995) have shown that people are generally quite willing to trust, and that given trust is often reciprocated (Johnson & Mislin, 2011; Van den Akker et al., 2020). The studies in this dissertation fit these patterns, but also show a more nuanced picture. By systematically modifying various situational features of the standard trust game, I showed that trust and trustworthiness also strongly depend on the situational characteristics. Modifying the trust game allowed me to investigate the consequences of (active and inactive) distrust, the role of informational uncertainty, and the importance of the timing of decisions. As such, the current dissertation contributes to our understanding of the benefits and boundary conditions of trust and trustworthiness, and their relationship with reciprocity.