Goal
The purpose of this study is to identify factors that influence trust people place in groups of people (potentially organizations) and whether that trust is warranted. We hypothesize that there will be variability in perception of various groups' trustworthiness and that groups which are perceived as more trustworthy will be entrusted with more money. In addition, it is expected that this perception will be relatively true to real behavior, meaning that groups which are perceived as more trustworthy will indeed choose to keep less money than groups perceived to be lower in trustworthiness. The factors expected to influence the perception of trustworthiness the most are a group's openness to others and group's perceived 'quality'.

Background
In this experiment, groups of three people are recruited to play the role of the investee in the trust game. Their interactions are taped. Separately, individuals are recruited for the role of the investors. The individual investor will listen to the taped group discussion of the investees and then decide on how much money to entrust to the group. This allows the researcher to identify groups that are perceived to be trustworthy, to extract factors responsible for this and to check whether these perceptions were accurate.

Last Updated: June 1, 2006