Do You Trust Your Brethren? Eliciting Trust Attitudes and Trust Behavior in a Tanzanian Congregation

The dominating subject pool in economic experiments is undergraduate university students. Reasons for this include access and convenience to experimentors, but the representativeness of this pool has not been fully established. This paper describes one possible method for using other subject pools. We also report the results from an experiment in which 145 subjects belonging to a specific church in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania were exposed to a Trust Game and a standard set of attitudinal survey questions in order to study trust and trustworthiness, two concepts that are likely to be at the core of the formation of social capital. Issues of method are discussed, and the results are contrasted with those from a Trust Game with Tanzanian undergraduate students as the subject pool.