A Nation-Wide Laboratory. Examining trust and trustworthiness by integrating behavioral experiments into representative surveys

By Ernst Fehr, Urs Fischbacher, B. Rosenbladt, Jürgen Schupp, Gert G. Wagner. Journal of Contextual Economics – Schmollers Jahrbuch, 2002

446 citations recorded by the source corpus.

"Typically, laboratory experiments suffer from homogeneous subject pools and self-selection biases. The usefulness of survey data is limited by measurement error and by the questionability of their behavioral relevance. Here we present a method integrating interactive experiments and representative surveys thereby overcoming crucial weaknesses of both approaches. One of the major advantages of our approach is that it allows for the integration of experiments, which require interaction among the participants, with a survey of non-interacting respondents in a smooth and inexpensive way. We illustrate the power of our approach with the analysis of trust and trustworthiness in Germany by combining representative survey data with representative behavioral data from a social dilemma experiment. We identify which survey questions intended to elicit peoples trust correlate well with behaviorally exhibited trust in the experiment. People above the age of 65, highly skilled workersnand people living in bigger households exhibit less trusting behavior. Foreign citizens, Catholics andnpeople favoring the Social Democratic Party or the Christian Democratic Party exhibit more trust.nPeople above the age of 65 and those in good health behave more trustworthy or more altruistically,nrespectively. People below the age of 35, the unemployed and people who say they are in favor ofnnone of the political parties behave less trustworthy or less altruistically, respectively."

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/31ab4e8ba2632d87cb64e981fb33ee9d431d8377

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Citations in the corpus

The Preference Survey Module: A Validated Instrument for Measuring Risk, Time, and Social Preferences (2016, unknown): “Regarding nonstudent samples, Fehr et al. (2002) used a representative sample of German adults, and documented a signi ﬁ cant correlation between subjects ’ behavior in an incentivized investment game, and survey measures on trust of the type contained in our preference module.”
Cooperation and Competition in Intergenerational Experiments in (2008, unknown): “While we do not measure social preferences, results from Fehr et al. (2002), Bellemare and Kröger (2007) and Sutter and Kocher (2007) suggest that seniors may care more about total social payoffs, since they are more generous as responders in a trust game than are younger people.”
Personal, Interpersonal, and Political Temperaments (2007, background): “) Using a German sample, Fehr et al. (2002) found a weak connection between party affiliation (but not ideological position) and trusting behavior.”
Trust, Positive Reciprocity, and Negative Reciprocity: Do These Traits Impact Entrepreneurial Dynamics? (2010, unknown): “Fehr et al. (2002) tested the survey measures of trust using a large-scale field experiment where subjects took part in a paid trust game and answered the survey questions on trust.”
Chapter 8 The Economics of Fairness, Reciprocity and Altruism – Experimental Evidence and New Theories (2006, background): “Two representative data sets recently addressed this question – one from Germany (Fehr et al. 2002) and one from the Netherlands (Bellemare and Kröger 2003).”
Pro-social behavior in a natural setting (2004, background): “Recently, a large number of laboratory experiments have been devoted to the study of reciprocity in economics (see the surveys in, e.g., Fehr and Gachter, 2000a; Falk and Fischbacher, 2001 ).”
Microfoundations of Social Capital (2012, methodology): “The experiment is implemented as an “artefactual field experiment” (Harrison and List 2004) by running our experiment and survey over the internet rather than in face-to-face interaction (as is the case, for example, in the World Values Survey, Glaeser et al. 2000 or Fehr et al. 2003).”
National culture and bank risk-taking (2017, unknown): “Ahern et al. (2015) comment extensively on the validity of the three cultural constructs from WVS, which have been validated by other studies as well; see for example Fehr et al. (2003), Glaeser et al. (2000) and Holm and Danielson (2005).”
The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa (2011, unknown): “Fehr et al. (2003) randomly surveyed a sample of 429 German adults who answered a questionnaire containing trust questions and also participated in controlled trust experiments.”