A MICRO-MACRO STUSY OF TRUST

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The most important achievement of this research project is the formulation of a theoretical framework for analyzing both trust-related behavior and judgments at the individual-micro level and the roles trust plays at a more macro, societal level in a integrated manner. More specifically, first of all, a series of experiments we conducted revealed a counter-intuitive relationship between generalized interpersonal trust and sensitivity to information potentially revealing lack of trustworthiness in others. That is, in this series of experiments, high trusters (those who have a high level of "default" expectations for trustworthiness of others in general) as measured through a general trust scale were shown to be more sensitive to information suggesting lack of trustworthiness of other people and, furthermore, more accurate in predicting other people's behavior in a prisoner's dilemma game (playd between anonymous playrs) than low trusters. Another series of experiments, including US-Japa … More n, cross-societal experiments, revealed the tendency that people form stable commitment relations with a particular set of partners in social environments that impose a low level of opportunity costs for maintaining such commitment relations, implying the enhanced needs for detecting the nature of social relationships and depressed needs for detecting character traits of others in such social environments compared to the environments that impose a higher level of opportunity costs for maintaining commitment relations. Those and other findings of experiments we conducted all point to the possibility of two, mutually indepent forms of social intelligence-one for detecting the nature of interpersonal relations and the other for detecting character traits of other individuals that govern their behavior independent of social environment. Furthermore, these two forms of social intelligence are theorized to have differential levels of importance according to the nature of social environments, especially the general level of opportunity costs, Under social environments n which the general level of opportunity costs is high, people would naturally invest cognitive resources in the development of the second type of social intelligence, become able to detect lack of trustworthiness in others, and thus become able to afford to have a high level of "default" expectations for other people's trustworthiness. Currently, replications of the experiments we conducted are being executed or planned in other countries, both East and West. Results from those replication experiments by researchers in other countries will advance our understanding of the socially embedded nature of trust. Less