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Personal Trust Increases Cooperation beyond General Trust

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  • Cristina Acedo-Carmona
  • Antoni Gomila

Abstract

In this paper we present a new methodology which, while allowing for anonymous interaction, it also makes possible to compare decisions of cooperating or defecting when playing games within a group, according to whether or not players personally trust each other. The design thus goes beyond standard approaches to the role of trust in fostering cooperation, which is restricted to general trust. It also allows considering the role of the topology of the social network involved may play in the level of cooperation found. The results of this work support the idea that personal trust promotes cooperation beyond the level of general trust. We also found that this effect carries over to the whole group, making it more cohesive, but that higher levels of cohesion rely on a particular topology. As a conclusion, we hypothesize that personal trust is a psychological mechanism evolved to make human social life possible in the small groups our ancestors lived in, and that this mechanism persists and plays a role in sustaining cooperation and social cohesion.

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  • Cristina Acedo-Carmona & Antoni Gomila, 2014. "Personal Trust Increases Cooperation beyond General Trust," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 9(8), pages 1-10, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0105559
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0105559
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    2. Gill, David & Rosokha, Yaroslav, 2020. "Beliefs, learning, and personality in the indefinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 489, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).
    3. Cristina Acedo-Carmona & Enric Munar & Antoni Gomila, 2018. "Trust-based altruism facing new contexts: The Vyegwa-Gika pygmies from Burundi," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 13(10), pages 1-13, October.
    4. Stefan Leenheer & Maurice Gesthuizen & Michael Savelkoul, 2021. "Two-Way, One-Way or Dead-End Streets? Financial and Social Causes and Consequences of Generalized Trust," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 155(3), pages 915-937, June.
    5. Hitesh Sapkota & Pradeep K Murukannaiah & Yi Wang, 2019. "A network-centric approach for estimating trust between open source software developers," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(12), pages 1-30, December.
    6. Rabbani, Mehnaz & Rahman, Semab & Tasneem, Dina, 2022. "Trust and citizen participation in community-based monitoring system: An experimental evidence from Bangladesh," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 98(C).

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