Is social capital bridging or bonding? Evidence from a field experiment with association members

Social capital theorists posit that association members are key agents for propagating norms of trust and trustworthiness from within associations toward the society as a whole. Nevertheless, others claim that social capital is primarily bonding, that is, it helps ingroup members better achieve internal goals, but little benefits or even costs carry over to the rest of society. We deploy experimental methods to probe into whether social capital in associations has a predominantly bridging or bonding nature. We compare members’ behavior in anonymous Trust Games with behavior by a demographically comparable sample of non-members. We find that (a) Members are significantly more trusting and trustworthy than the general population both when interacting with fellow members and with people from the general population; (b) Members trust and repay trust from people from the general public nearly at the same level as they do with fellow members. Therefore, most of social capital existing within associations “bridges” over to the rest of society. We quantify 83% of additional trust, and 71% of additional trustworthiness existing in associations vis-à-vis society at large to be bridging and the remainder to be bonding. (c) Association members are no more optimistic or less accurate in predicting others’ behavior than people from the general public. (d) Increased involvement in association activities is not correlated with increased pro-sociality.