Betrayal Aversion: Evidence from Brazil, China, Oman, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United States

By I. Bohnet, Fiona Greig, Benedikt Herrmann, Richard J. Zeckhauser. 2008

496 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Due to betrayal aversion, people take risks less willingly when the agent of uncertainty is another person rather than nature. Individuals in six countries (Brazil, China, Oman, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United States) confronted a binary-choice trust game or a risky decision offering the same payoffs and probabilities. Risk acceptance was calibrated by asking individuals their “minimum acceptable probability” (MAP) for securing the high payoff that would make them willing to accept the risky rather than the sure payoff. People’s MAPs are generally higher when another person rather than nature determines the outcome. This indicates betrayal aversion.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, General Decision Sciences, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fcfabb21f4606fc7185c37b9af7ddf0d3c888eba

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Citations in the corpus

Dictating the Risk: Experimental Evidence on Giving in Risky Environments (2013, background): “Relatedly, Bohnet and Zeckhauser (2004) and Bohnet et al. (2008) analyse how recipients in a risky dictator game adjust acceptance rates depending on whether an actual person or a random process determines the outcome of the game. Unlike these authors, however, we use variations on ordinary dictator”
Societal trust and corporate tax avoidance (2018, unknown): “In particular, trust is an action taken by a party in an economic transaction with the anticipation that the other party in the transaction will not exploit the vulnerability that the party has created for herself by taking an action with an uncertain outcome (James 2002; Bohnet et al. 2008).”
Distinguishing trust from risk: An anatomy of the investment game (2010, background): “This leaves open the possibility that emotional factors such as betrayal aversion (Bohnet et al., 2008; de Quervain et al., 2004; Aimone 5 A variety of procedures are available to elicit risk attitudes, including Abdellaoui (2000), Hey and Orme (1994), Wakker and Deneffe (1996), and Charness and…”
Trust: An Integrative Review from a Person–Situation Perspective (2015, background): “More specifically, one line of research showed that participants are less willing to take a risk in trust situations compared with nonsocial risk situations (Baumgartner et al., 2008; Bohnet et al., 2008; Bohnet & Zeckhauser, 2004; Kosfeld et al., 2005).”
Paradoxes and mechanisms for choice under risk (2014, unknown): “The most commonly used mechanism for multiple-decision social preferences experiments is PAS (e.g. Bohnet et al. 2008; Charness and Haruvy 2002; Fehr and Ga¨chter 2000, 2002; Fehr and Schmidt 2004), which has internal theoretical validity for income models of decision under risk.”
Social Preferences under Risk: Equality of Opportunity versus Equality of Outcome (2013, background): “In such experiments, Karni, Salmon, and Sopher (2008); Bohnet et al. (2008); Kircher, Ludwig, and Sandroni (2013); and Bolton and Ockenfels (2010) found that a considerable number of subjects chose a probability of winning the good equally.”
On the Economics and Biology of Trust (2009, methodology): “Knack and Keefer (1997) report positive correlations between a measure of trust and a country’s average annual GDP growth rate between 1980 and 1992.”
Do strong family ties inhibit trust (2008, background): “11 Recent research suggests that the decision to trust is shaped by ‘exploitation’ or ‘betrayal’ aversion rather than by risk aversion (Bohnet and Zeckhauser, 2004; Bohnet et al., 2008).”
Economic incentives and social preferences: substitutes or complements? (2012, background): “The respondents may have exhibited what Bohnet and her coauthors call “betrayal aversion,” which was attenuated by knowing that betrayal would be punished by a third party (Bohnet et al. 2008).”
Civic Capital as the Missing Link (2010, background): “However, evidence from 6 countries (Brazil, China, Oman, Switzerland, Turkey and the United States) collected by Bohnet et al (2008) seems to suggest that risk and betrayal preferences do differ, though sample sizes are not large enough to draw strong conclusions (see also Naef et al. 2008).”
Do Markets Erode Social Responsibility (2015, background): “and behavior between Chinese and Western individuals in non-market contexts (Buchan et al. 2006; Chuah et al. 2007; Bohnet et al. 2008; Herrmann et al. 2008).”
Trust and Trustworthiness (2018, unknown): “Building on this design, Bohnet et al. (2008) conducted these experiments in 6 different countries and observed aversion to natural risk in all countries, as well as aversion to betrayal risk in 4 out of 6 countries (in Oman, Switzerland, Turkey, and the U.”
Social influences on risk attitudes: Applications in economics (2012, background): “Bohnet and Zeckhauser (2004) and Bohnet et al. (2008) devise a clever experimental design to clearly separate the pure risk aspect from the additional social component using behavioral data.”