Psycho-social Foundations for Building Trust Societies

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The goal of this study was to clarify the mechanisms that promote voluntarily based social order, not constrained by the closed nature of social relations, in a situation in which provision is "assurance" of security based on commitment relations is not possible. We used "artificial societies" created in the laboratory to achieve this goal. As a means to achieve this goal, we found that building a trust relationship (i.e., transforming an opportunistic relationship into a trust relationship) requires risk taking. We further identified socio-relational and socio-institutional conditions that are required for this transformation. Specifically, our results indicate the followings. ◆Risk taking plays an indispensable role in building a trust relationship. ◆In building a trust relationship, a strategy to cooperate while reducing the risk of trusting to the minimal is highly effective. ◆The role that reputation plays in reducing the agency problem caused by information asymmetry varies depending on the nature of the society or market-whether it is open or closed. Negative reputation is effective in closed societies, and positive reputation is effective in closed societies. ◆Punishment of non-cooperators in a group is produced by a different psychological mechanism that produces punishment of out-group defectors. ◆Heuristics explain cooperation in a one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma game better than utility transformation model. ◆Expectation of generalized exchange within a group is indispensable in cooperation toward in-group members, whether the groups are minimal groups or nationality groups. However, it is not a necessary condition for cooperation toward in-group members when interactions among group members exist. ◆Experience of collectivistic social institutions make collectivistic (or interdependent) self-construal and causal attribution (i.e., collectivistic belief system) salient.