Relationship between social value orientation and the tendency to trust others

Abstract

Trust in others is essential for people's collaboration and has considerable economic effects. Trust can be measured in many economic laboratory experiments. We conducted the sender-receiver experiment where the receiver trusted or not the message delivered by the sender. The simple social value orientation test with six questions measured social preferences on a scale from altruistic to competitive behavior. We found that altruistic people tend to trust more, while competitive people tend to trust less.