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InsideTrust: understanding what makes people trust

InsideTrust: understanding what makes people trust

Tipologia
Fondazione CSP
Programma di ricerca
Compagnia San Paolo 2016
Ente finanziatore
Compagnia San Paolo
Settore ERC
SH1_7 - Behavioural economics
SH1_15 - Public economics
SH3_4 - Social integration, exclusion, prosocial behaviour
SH3_5 - Attitudes and beliefs
SH3_7 - Kinship
Budget
77.986,04
Periodo
01/05/2017 - 01/05/2020
Coordinatore
Pierluigi Conzo

Aree / Gruppi di ricerca

Partecipanti al progetto

Descrizione del progetto

Trust in strangers, also defined as generalized/out-group trust, is key ingredient of social capital (e.g. Putnam 1995), with positive effects on growth (Zak and Knack 2001; Algan and Cahuc 2010) and well-being (Bjørnskov 2003). Trust appears stable over time (Volken, 2002), culturally inherited (Uslaner 2004) and decreasing in income inequality (Knack & Keefer 1997) and ethnic diversity (Bjørnskov 2007). This literature, however, focuses on cross-country comparisons of average trust levels, which is likely to reduce to a single value all the heterogeneous factors influencing trust at the individual level ---a crucial information for policy design. Also social relations matter for trust (Coleman 1988), e.g. through learning, control (Buskens and Raub 2002) and imitation (Barrera and Buskens 2007). Nevertheless, these studies consider actors embedded in the same network, neglecting how personal relations influence out-group trust. Although individuals trust strangers even when game theory predicts that they should not (Jonshon and Mislin 2011), still scarce emphasis is laid by the related literature on the drivers of individuals’ trust. The pioneer paper by Alesina and La Ferrara (2002) shows that trust decreases with traumatic experiences, low income and education and living in racially mixed areas. They, however, analyse only US citizens from 1974 to 1994 and do not account for the potential unobserved heterogeneity that may lead to a biased inference. More recently, the behavioural evidence suggested that trust comprises diverse preferences, e.g. altruism (Cox 2004), impatience (Albanese et al. 2013) and risk aversion (Eckel and Wilson 2004), which are usually studied in international experimental labs, such as The Choice Lab (Bergen), ELSE (Utrecht), LEEP (Paris), WZB (Berlin), CESS (Oxford), IBRC (Durham), etc. Yet, little is said on what determines such preferences at the individual level. This is surprising given the economic benefits of increasing trust – for EU citizens increasing interpersonal trust is worth €8,497/year in terms of foregone income (Orlowski and Wicker 2015) -, and its potential contribution to inclusive societies in the age of growing migration and economic downturn. InsideTrust’s main objective is to understand what makes a trusting person. This project is path-breaking as it goes beyond the above-mentioned literature by expanding, in a multidisciplinary perspective, the understandings of the socio-demographic, psychological and economic foundations of individuals’ trust. It offers public policy a menu with the key ingredients of people’s trust, and how these are affected by the socio-institutional context. Through the analysis of EU surveys and lab-experiments in Italy - a natural laboratory to explore trust across heterogeneous regions (e.g. Bigoni et al. 2016), with generalized trust values ranging from those of top-trusting countries (e.g. Sweden) to those of least-trusting countries (e.g. Bulgaria) in EU (EVS data, 2008) - a multidisciplinary team will fulfil the following objectives:

- Objective 1: Identify household, individual and societal factors in the childhood that predict trust across EU adults. To the best of our knowledge this project is the first in identifying childhood characteristics at the individual, household and societal level that predict trust in the adulthood.

- Objective 2: Analyse if and how social trust adjust to socio-economic and demographic shocks. The macro-level stability of trust and its association with traumas at a micro-level are likely hiding heterogeneous trust responses to life shocks. Through panel-data tools controlling for this endogeneity, InsideTrust identifies the events affecting trust and the factors influencing the intensity and speed of adaptation, on average and across different groups of EU citizens.

- Objective 3: Inspect the psychological foundations of self-reported trust. Few studies investigate the heuristics behind these answers (Evans & Krueger 2016), though neglecting the implicit representations of who are the “most people” to be trusted (e.g. the radius of trust). As “most people” may not imply the same circle of “others” everywhere, this project uncovers the implicit anchors in self-reported trust and how these vary in different socio-cultural contexts.

- Objective 4: Understand how media representation of social diversity affects trust. We provide experimental evidence on how trust reacts to external stimuli depicting social diversity with negative vs. positive valence. As an innovative contribution, InsideTrust examines fear as key- channel through which induced representations of migration affect out-group trust.

- Objective 5: Examine if out-group trust is explained by differences in social networks. The prevalence of out-group trust in individualistic vs. collectivistic societies (e.g. Yamagishi 2011) is explained by the context-specific nature of personal relationships. However, the empirical evidence linking trust and relationships is very limited (Glanville and Andersson 2013). This project deepens the analysis of how out-group trust is affected by differences in social networks by investigating the network characteristics associated with both behavioral and attitudinal measures of trust.

 

Risultati e pubblicazioni

Negative media portrayals of immigrants increase ingroup favoritism and hostile physiological and emotional reactions
2021-01-01 Conzo P.; Fuochi G.; Anfossi L.; Spaccatini F.; Mosso C.O. https://iris.unito.it/handle/2318/1844129

Blessed are the first: The long-term effect of birth order on trust
2020-01-01 Conzo, Pierluigi; Zotti, Roberto https://iris.unito.it/handle/2318/1743627

Childhood exposure to the Second World War and financial risk taking in adult life
2020-01-01 Bellucci, Davide; Fuochi, Giulia; Conzo, Pierluigi https://iris.unito.it/handle/2318/1715555

A war is forever: The long-run effects of early exposure to World War II on trust
2019-01-01 Conzo P.; Salustri F. https://iris.unito.it/handle/2318/1715567

Ultimo aggiornamento: 27/10/2022 15:52
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