Trust In Social Dilemmas

One of the key scientific challenges is the puzzle of human cooperation. Why do people cooperate with one another? What causes individuals to lend a helping hand to a stranger, even if it comes at a major cost to their own well-being? Why do people severely punish those who violate social norms and undermine the collective interest? Edited by Paul A.M. Van Lange, Bettina Rockenbach, and Toshio Yamagishi, Trust in Social Dilemmas carefully considers the role of trust in establishing, promoting, and maintaining overall human cooperation. By exploring the impact of trust and effective cooperation on relationships, organizations, and communities, Trust in Social Dilemmas draws inspiration from the fact that social dilemmas, defined in terms of conflicts between self-interest and the collective interest, are omnipresent in today's society. In capturing the breadth and relevance of trust to social dilemmas and human cooperation more generally, this book is structured in three effective parts for readers: the biology and development of trust; the importance of trust for groups and organizations; and how trust factors across the overall health of today's society. As Van Lange, Rockenbach, Yamagishi, and their team of expert contributors all explore in this compelling new volume, there is little doubt that trust and cooperation are intimately related in most - if not all - of our social dilemmas.

Trust facilitates communication, love, friendship, and co-operation and is fundamentally important to human relationships and personal development. Using examples from daily life, interviews, literature, and film, Govier describes the role of trust in friendship and in family relationships as well as the connection between self-trust, self-respect, and self-esteem. She examines the reasons we trust or distrust others and ourselves, and the expectations and vulnerabilities that accompany those attitudes. But trust should not be blind. Acknowledging that distrust is often warranted, Govier describes strategies for coping with distrust and designing workable relationships despite it. She also examines situations in which the integrity of interpersonal relationships has been violated by serious breaches of trust and explores themes of forgiveness, reconciliation, and the restoration of trust. By encouraging reflection on our own attitudes of trust and distrust, this fascinating book points the way to a better understanding of our relationships and ourselves.

This volume provides a psychological overview of research on human cooperation, while discussing evolutionary and cultural perspectives, along with applications in the management, environment, national security, and health.

While trust and trustworthiness provide a fundamental foundation for human relationships, little is known about how trusting and trustworthy behavior in social dilemmas is related to age and aging. A few papers use data from surveys such as the World Values Survey to address a potential connection between trust and age. In this chapter, we will mainly focus on trusting and trustworthy behavior elicited with the use of the seminal trust game (Berg et al., 1995) and with games implementing a similar incentivized interaction structure. The results suggest that trust and trustworthiness increase with young age until adolescence. Trustworthiness reaches the level of adults at an earlier age (at around 15-16 years of age) than trusting behavior (around adulthood). Survey results differ from incentivized experiments when it comes to a potential development of trust in adulthood. The former indicate a steady rise in trust levels at a small rate when becoming older, whereas the latter show a decline, starting at an age of about 60 years.

Readers need look no further if they seeking an edited volume compiled to present the latest developments in the field of social dilemma research. Social dilemmas are situations when there is a conflict between self-interest and collective interest. This work examines under what circumstances people make decisions that are in line with the collective interest as well as investigating what can increase the likelihood of cooperation. Three man sections mirror the different levels of analysis: individual, group, and societal.

The question of how cooperation and social order can evolve from a Hobbesian state of nature of a “war of all against all” has always been at the core of social scientific inquiry. Social dilemmas are the main analytical paradigm used by social scientists to explain competition, cooperation, and conflict in human groups. The formal analysis of social dilemmas allows for identifying the conditions under which cooperation evolves or unravels. This knowledge informs the design of institutions that promote cooperative behavior. Yet to gain practical relevance in policymaking and institutional design, predictions derived from the analysis of social dilemmas must be put to an empirical test. The collection of articles in this book gives an overview of state-of-the-art research on social dilemmas, institutions, and the evolution of cooperation. It covers theoretical contributions and offers a broad range of examples on how theoretical insights can be empirically verified and applied to cooperation problems in everyday life. By bringing together a group of distinguished scholars, the book fills an important gap in sociological scholarship and addresses some of the most interesting questions of human sociality.

This book is the result of the workshop “Deception, Fraud, and Trust in Agent Societies”, held in Barcelona on June 4, 2000 as part of the Autonomous Agents 2000 Conference, and organized by Rino Falcone, Munindar Singh, and Yao-Hua Tan. The aim of the workshop was to bring together researchers from di?- ent ?elds (Arti?cial Intelligence, Multi-Agent Systems, Cognitive Science, Game Theory, and Social and Organizational Sciences) that could contribute to a b- ter understanding of trust and deception in agent societies. The workshop scope included theoretical results as well as their applications in human-computer - teraction and electronic commerce. This book includes the revised and extended versions of the works presented at the workshop, incorporating many points that emerged in our discussions, as well as invited papers from experts in the ?eld, which in our view allows a complete coverage of all relevant issues. We gratefully acknowledge the ?nancial support from the Italian National Research Council - Institute for Cognitive S- ence and Technology and the ALFEBIITE European Project, contract number IST-1999-10298. We would like to express our gratitude to Cristiano Castelfranchi for his stimulating and valuable comments and suggestions both for the organization of the workshop and for the preparation of this book.

It is organized around four core issues, individual differences, which determine people's preferences for outcomes that promote either their own or their group's well-being; the study of dynamic processes based on simulations of artificial societies; social dilemmas that emerge in intergroup conflicts; and the effect of various types and sources of uncertainty on behavior in social dilemma situations."--BOOK JACKET.