Collaborative Research on Trust, Race, Framing and Institutions

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This research focuses on the linkage between discrimination and trust. This linkage is especially important when considering the important role that trust plays in the success of initial encounters between strangers. In many social settings trust and reciprocity can improve the well-being of both parties. Quite often brief, face-to-face interactions are the primary basis by which individuals initiate and build social networks in economic and political arenas. If particular ethnic groups are not trusted in these brief interactions (through discrimination), then individuals from those ethnic groups lose the opportunity to prove themselves trustworthy. Consequently those individuals lose access to many financial opportunities that stem from repeated interactions that are fueled by trusting relationships.Laboratory experiments are used by which strangers make decisions with one another. The decisions involve financial stakes in which one person can trust another, and in return, a counterpart can choose to be trustworthy. The experiments manipulate three major variables: the ethnicity of the partners; the framework in which the decision is cast; and the institutional guarantees underlying the trust game. The experimental are novel in that they are conducted via the internet, in real time, between multiple laboratories. The experiments suggest policy interventions that can encourage initial trusting behavior through minimizing discrimination.