Trust Does Beget Trustworthiness and Also Begets Trust in Others

Social scientists widely believe that trust begets trustworthiness, meaning that persons reward actions that they view as expressing trust. But evidence from the trust game (also known as the investment game)—introduced by Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe and frequently used to test this relationship—is surprisingly inconclusive. The present article therefore reexamines this hypothesis (Experiment 1), using the trust game but incorporating mediation analysis and distinguishing between trust and distrust effects. The trust game has been used to study the effects of trust within a relationship: when A trusts B, does this affect B’s behavior toward A? This research (in Experiment 2) extends the question: when A trusts B, is B more likely to trust another player C in a second (unrelated) game? If so, then trust relationships have a transitive structure. Taken together, findings from these experiments show that trust begets trustworthiness and also trust in others.