The Effect of Social Distance on Trust and Trustworthiness in Social Networks: An Experiment

Abstract

We experimentally explore the effect of social distance on trust and trustworthiness by using three-node network trust game which contains one trustor and two trustees. When the relationship between strangers is considered as a long social distance, we employ real-life acquaintances to stand for short social distance. In the baseline treatment, all three members are completely strangers. While in the experimental treatment, one of the trustees is an acquaintance of the trustor and the other trustee is a stranger. The experimental results demonstrate that the varied social distances among trustor and trustees make some difference even when the identity information is semi-transparent that the trustor cannot tell with certainty which trustee is the acquaintance. The presence of the acquaintance promotes the trusting behaviour of the trustor towards both trustees. And the reactions of the two trustees are respectively higher than the trustees in the baseline treatment. Surprisingly, there is no significant difference of the return proportion between the stranger trustee and the acquaintance of the trustor owing to that both trustees in the multi periods trust game could compete for the chance to cooperate with the trustor in the future periods.