It's a Matter of Trust

Putting your faith in others is best way to get them to do what you want

WEDNESDAY, March 12, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- If you want someone to do your bidding, what's the best way to increase the chances that it gets done?

Threaten to punish them if they disobey you? Or explain what you want done, and then let them know you trust them to see it through?

A new study says that trusting others is the best way to ensure their cooperation.

"What we have shown is that it is better to trust," says Ernst Fehr, an economics professor at the University of Zurich in Switzerland and lead author of the study, which appears in the March 12 issue of the journal Nature. "Those who did were much more likely to get what they wanted."

Social scientists are constantly grappling with two seemingly irreconcilable facets of human society -- self interest vs. cooperation.

The first, well-accepted rule is that humans are generally motivated by self-interest. The second is that human society depends on an endless stream of cooperation between people -- from family members to co-workers to strangers.

"Almost all of our social life is a give-and-take," Fehr says.

If people were motivated purely by self-interest, threatening to punish those who cross you would be the most effective means of making sure they don't, Fehr says.

But in the real world, it's common knowledge that honey catches more flies than vinegar, so to speak.

And while humans have a complex set of laws to enforce many aspects of interaction, the fact remains that most of that interaction depends on trust -- implicit agreements and social norms, Fehr says.

You trust that the people in the other car will stop at the red light. You trust that the pharmacist will give you the correct medication. You trust your employees to do their job when you're not standing over their shoulder.

"In everyday life, many of our human interactions are not based on contracts but on an implicit understanding of what the expectations are," Fehr says. "If I invite you to dinner, you bring a bottle of wine. You wouldn't threaten to punish the person for not bringing the wine, because it introduces an element of hostility."

To try to better understand the role of trust in human societies, Fehr and his colleagues set up a laboratory experiment in which two people had to cooperate in dividing up money.

In the experiment, researchers divided up 200 college students into two groups, the "investors" and the "trustees." (During the experiment, the participants were not aware they'd been labeled with such evocative terms).

Both the investors and the trustees, who were in separate rooms and never met each other, were each given $10. The investors were then told that they could give some of the money to the trustee. Whatever amount they gave to the trustee would be tripled. The trustee then had the option of returning some money to the investor.

"The prediction is if both people are completely selfish, a selfish investor will not send any money, and the trustee will never send back any money, so no money is sent in either direction," Fehr says. "But that's not what happened."

Instead, the investor often did trust the trustee and sent some portion of their $10, usually about $7.

On average, the trustee returned about 41 percent of what the investor sent (tripled, as per the rules of the game).

"Anything that is sent back by the trustee is an altruistic act, not a selfish act," Fehr says. "They were under no contractual obligation to send anything."

But the rate of return -- and hence, the incidence of altruism -- changed when another variable was added into the mix: the threat of punishment, in the form of a $4 fine.

In the second stage of the experiment, the investors were given the option of suggesting the amount of money they would like to have returned from the trustee -- and imposing a $4 fine if the trustee didn't satisfy the demand.

Researchers found that when investors invoked the threat of the fine, trustees gave back less to the investor -- only about 30 percent of what the investor sent.

However, when both parties knew the fine was an option but the investor chose not to use it (in other words, when the investor signaled that he trusted the trustee), the rate of return shot up to 48 percent.

"Threats of sanctioning sometimes backfire," Fehr says. "If threat is available but deliberately not used, you get the most out of the trustee. It's the best of all situations. It signals a particular form of trust."

John Hibbing, a political science professor at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, says the study could give bosses new ways of handling their supervision of employees.

The study suggests that people are at their best when they have freedom and feel trusted, says Hibbing, who has written about the role of cooperation in human societies.

"People like to be trusted," Hibbing says. "If you have the sense somebody is looking over your shoulder, people react against that."

More information

Read more about the evolution of human behavior at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society or the Society for Evolutionary Analysis in Law.

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