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Trust across Disciplines

Trust & game theory - Regarding sociology

The game theoretic approach is one of the first that engaged researchers into studies about trust; the dilemma developed for experiments showed the intrinsec complexity of our choices regarding cooperation, altruism, strategies that develop through time and so on.

Social scientists analysed the results provided by the games developed by economists.

David Good

The laboratory study of strategic interaction has a long tradition in social psychology. It has focused on a wide variety of different games, of which the Prisoner's Dilemma is the best known, and ostensibly these studies provide the basis for a well-controlled examination of the performance of competing agents under different conditions. They have not gone uncriticized, and undoubtedly one cannot take their results as offering an unproblematic reflection of society at large. However, some of them have produced interesting and suggestive results [...] They are findings which are principally concerned with the conditions under which cooperation is fostered, in cases where the net cost of trust being misplaced will be greater than the actual individual gain from trusting. [...]

[In PD games] one important consideration for subjects is whether or not they view the interchange from a short-term or long-term perspective. In particular, if subjects believed that they would need to interact with each other after the study was concluded, and therefore the usual social and temporal isolation of such interactions was removed, their behaviour became considerably more cooperative. [...]

[Another interesting result is that] the greater the amount of communication there is between the players in a wide variety of games, the greater the likelihood of there being a mutually beneficial outcome. For example, [it has been shown that there is] least cooperation between female subjects when they were in a position where they could neither hear nor see one another, and most when they were in close proximity and could both see and hear one another. [...]

[Moreover,] the most machiavellian of the players were most able to exploit the situation to their greatest advantage, and do much better than chance would predict when the situation was most ambiguous. However, when the game was played such that each player knew exactly what resources the others had, and there was a minimum of ambiguity, this advantage disappeared.

To briefly summarize, then, [Good proposes] that in conditions where the long-term interests of the participants are stressed, where only small initial or additional rewards are at stake, where there is no potential for threat and great potential for successful communication in that the ambiguity of the situation is reduced, and where the participants are in free and easy contact, then cooperation and, one might suggest, a certain level of trust can develop.

References

Good, D. (1988). Individuals, Interpersonal Relations, and Trust. In Gambetta, D. (ed.) Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations. Electronic edition, Department of Sociology, University of Oxford. 3, 31-48.

Other perspectives on game theory

Dilemma were developed and analysed also in economics and by psychological and computer scientists.