Exploratory models of trust with empirically-inferred decision trees

Abstract

What is the relationship between an individual’s values and their propensity to trust other people? To explore this question, we built decision trees on themicrodata provided by the World Value’s Survey. Our findings confirm the extant literature while also hinting at cultural heterogeneity. We propose that studying nationally-specific decision trees based on survey data allows for easy-to-intuit representations of complex social problems. Moreover, for the sake of pragmatism, decision trees developed in this manner offer researchers a good tool in terms of cost-to-benefits.