The Effect of Cultural Trust on Cooperation in Two Behavioral Experiments

Trust is an important factor for cooperation in social dilemmas because of uncertainty and free-riding fears. Many contemporary social problems are characterized by uncertainty because they depend on the cooperation of thousands to resolve. Social trust as a personal belief is necessary but not sufficient for cooperation under these conditions. In contemporary social dilemmas, the trust-cooperation relationship likely depends on cultural trust: what people believe most other people believe about the trustworthiness of people in general. I test this theory in two experimental studies. In the first, cultural trust has an effect on cooperation independent of participants’ first-order social trust. In the second, I find that if participants learn that others expect them to not believe information on the trustfulness of most other people, they will behave more or less cooperatively, depending on whether the information indicates most others’ trust is high or low. I end with a discussion of the implications my findings have for addressing social dilemmas in an era of declining social trust.