Does Business Training Undermine Trust?
One central element of social institutions is trust — the sense that, in general, one can count on others engaged with the institutions to follow accepted rules and act with reasonable fairness. Economic institutions are no different: the self-interested pursuit of profit can undermine the workings of any market if it is not balanced with trust and cooperation. Economics graduate student Kelli Lanier is looking more closely at trust in several ways. In one project, she and collaborators assess how social scientists measure trust, contrasting the results obtained from surveys with the results obtained from studies where people are asked to play trust-games, simple games that turn on the players’ willingness to extend and reciprocate trust. In another, she is testing whether team-building exercises alter the level of trust people express in trust-games.
