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Status and Distrust: The Relevance of Inequality and Betrayal Aversion

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Author Info
Hong, Kesseley (Harvard U)
Bohnet, Iris (Harvard U)
Abstract

Trust is related to people's willingness to accept vulnerability, composed of their willingness to accept the risk of being worse off than if they had never trusted, the risk of being worse off than the trusted party, and the risk of being betrayed by the trusted party. We examine how people's status, focusing on sex, race, age and religion, affects their willingness to accept these three risks. We experimentally measure a person's willingness to accept risk in a Decision Problem, a Risky Dictator Game and a Trust Game. Groups typically considered having lower status in the US – women, minorities, younger people and non-Protestants – are averse to inequality while higher status groups-male, white, older and Protestant decision makers – dislike being betrayed. This heterogeneity in motivation asks for different organizational interventions to decrease distrust depending on a group's status.

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Paper provided by Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government in its series Working Paper Series with number rwp04-041.

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Date of creation: Sep 2004
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Handle: RePEc:ecl:harjfk:rwp04-041

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Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:

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  1. Borghans,J.A.M. & Borghans,Lex & Weel,Bas,ter, 2005. "Is There a Link between Economic Outcomes and Genetic Evolution? Cross-Country Evidence from the Major Histocompatibility Complex," Research Memoranda 029, Maastricht : MERIT, Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  2. Daouda Sembene, 2007. "Give Trust a Chance--A Model of Trust in the Context of an IMF-Supported Program," IMF Working Papers 07/42, International Monetary Fund. [Downloadable!]
  3. Lise Vesterlund & Cagri Kumru, 2005. "The Effects of Status on Voluntary Contribution," Working Papers 266, University of Pittsburgh, Department of Economics, revised Jan 2005. [Downloadable!]
  4. James Cox & Klarita Sadiraj & Vjollca Sadiraj, 2008. "Implications of trust, fear, and reciprocity for modeling economic behavior," Experimental Economics, Springer, vol. 11(1), pages 1-24, March. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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