{"title":"Trust, lies, and inequality","authors":"Ninghua Du, Shan Gui, Daniel Houser","doi":"10.1111/ajes.12540","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>The effect of endowment equality on trust may stem from outcome inequality aversion or changes in expected trustworthiness. Here, we measure trust as the expectation of honesty in a sender-receiver game, where participants must make trust decisions without knowing the outcome. Our design enables us to isolate the effect of initial endowment inequality on trust. Our results show that endowment inequality reduces trust regardless of whether it favors the sender or the receiver. We further find that the frequency of lies is insensitive to endowment inequality. Our results amplify the importance of equal starting positions in promoting trust.</p>","PeriodicalId":47133,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Economics and Sociology","volume":"83 1","pages":"249-262"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9000,"publicationDate":"2023-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"American Journal of Economics and Sociology","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajes.12540","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The effect of endowment equality on trust may stem from outcome inequality aversion or changes in expected trustworthiness. Here, we measure trust as the expectation of honesty in a sender-receiver game, where participants must make trust decisions without knowing the outcome. Our design enables us to isolate the effect of initial endowment inequality on trust. Our results show that endowment inequality reduces trust regardless of whether it favors the sender or the receiver. We further find that the frequency of lies is insensitive to endowment inequality. Our results amplify the importance of equal starting positions in promoting trust.
期刊介绍:
The American Journal of Economics and Sociology (AJES) was founded in 1941, with support from the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, to encourage the development of transdisciplinary solutions to social problems. In the introduction to the first issue, John Dewey observed that “the hostile state of the world and the intellectual division that has been built up in so-called ‘social science,’ are … reflections and expressions of the same fundamental causes.” Dewey commended this journal for its intention to promote “synthesis in the social field.” Dewey wrote those words almost six decades after the social science associations split off from the American Historical Association in pursuit of value-free knowledge derived from specialized disciplines. Since he wrote them, academic or disciplinary specialization has become even more pronounced. Multi-disciplinary work is superficially extolled in major universities, but practices and incentives still favor highly specialized work. The result is that academia has become a bastion of analytic excellence, breaking phenomena into components for intensive investigation, but it contributes little synthetic or holistic understanding that can aid society in finding solutions to contemporary problems. Analytic work remains important, but in response to the current lop-sided emphasis on specialization, the board of AJES has decided to return to its roots by emphasizing a more integrated and practical approach to knowledge.