CONSTRUCTION OF A MICRO-MACRO THEORY OF TRUST

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Several series of experiments and computer simulations were conduted as a means to provide empirical foundations for the micro-macro theory of trust. First, a series of experiments we conducted revealed a counter-intuitive relationship between generalized interpersonal trust and sensitivity to signals potentially revealing lack of trustworthiness in others. That is, high trusters as measured through a general trust scale were shown to be more sensitive than low trusters to information suggesting lack of trustworthiness of other people and, furthermore, were more accurate in predicting other people's behavior in a prisoner's dilemma game. Another series of experiments, including US-Japan, cross-societal experiments, revealed a 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 re … More lationships 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 existence of two, mutually independent 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 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 come to afford to have a high level of "default" expectations for other people's trustworthiness. Less