ACQUISITION AND MAINTENANCE OF TRUSTING BEHAVIOR

Don F. Hake · Tom L. Schmid

34 citations0/0 files storedJournal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics Behavioral and Psychological Studies

Abstract

This study determined whether a two-person exchange situation contained natural contingencies for trusting behavior or whether external contingencies were necessary. Pairs of college students worked matching-to-sample problems for money. On each trial there was one problem and the subjects determined which of them would solve it. Trusting behavior was defined as an increase in the number of consecutive problems each subject allowed his partner to work during sessions that also ended with an equitable distribution. Simply, trust was a temporary deviation from equity. A subject could give the problem to the other person (cooperate), or not respond and let the other person take the problem (share). Other possibilities were for both subjects to try to take the problem (complete), or for neither subject to respond and thereby let the person who worked the last problem also work the next one (passive trust). When only four lever pulls were required to distribute a problem (no external contingencies to reach either equity or trust) subjects reached equity, but only minimal trust (strict alternation of single problems) developed in 18 sessions. When 30 or 60 lever pulls were required to distribute a problem (smaller response requirement for passive trust and therefore a contingency for trust), trusting behavior developed after a few sessions (fixed ratio 30) or after several trials of the first session (fixed ratio 60) and it ordinarily expanded gradually to 10 to 15 consecutive problems through passive trust. The aversiveness of the inequity involved in trusting appears to necessitate a contingency for acquisition. Once trust develops, however, this aversiveness is reduced as subjects learn the inequity is only temporary (e.g., once trust was acquired at fixed ratio 60 it was maintained at fixed ratio 4, which would not initially produce it), and the direction of the inequity appears to become of questionable importance (e.g., being behind was alternated over rather than within sessions and usually not in a systematic manner).

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 34 citations exist upstream.

References

1965Exchange and Power in Social Life.1960The Social Psychology of Groups 1958Trust and suspicion 1975Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms.1970Effects of isolation and communication on cooperation in a two-person game.1976Cooperation: An Experimental Analysis.1970Bargaining and reciprocity.1975UNEQUAL REINFORCER MAGNITUDES AND RELATIVE PREFERENCE FOR COOPERATION IN THE DYAD1

Cited by

1984INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS: COOPERATION AND COMPETITION 1998Social Behavior 2010Reciprocity of Responding as a Determinant of Partial-altruistic Behavior in Humans

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.