Interpersonal trust has long been known to influence cooperation. This study tested the hypothesis that one's degree of trust in others will influence the extent to which one reacts to the presence of fear (or the possibility of receiving no payoff for cooperative actions) in a payoff matrix....

Existing studies of social dilemmas in other cultures report patterns of behavior that are very similar to that of American subjects. This has held even in cultures that are seemingly quite different from the United States in terms of their emphasis on the collective over the individual. We...

This study examined how low- and high-trust individuals react to messages of intended behavior in a social dilemma situation. Subjects played a two-person prisoner's dilemma; the opponent was a reciprocal strategy programmed by the experimenter. During the game, subjects received a message...