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On the interpretation of World Values Survey trust question - global expectations vs. local beliefs

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  • Ritwik Banerjee

    (Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University, Denmark)

Abstract

How should we interpret the World Values Survey (WVS) trust question? We conduct an experiment in India - a low trust country, to correlate the WVS trust question with trust decisions in an incentivized Trust Game. Evidence supports findings from one strand of the fractured literature - the WVS trust question captures expectations about others’ trustworthiness, though not always. We show that WVS trust question correlates with globally determined stable expectations but does not correlate with short term locally determined fluctuations in beliefs about trustworthiness. One implication of our study is that survey based methods may not be used to measure contextualized beliefs.

Suggested Citation

  • Ritwik Banerjee, 2015. "On the interpretation of World Values Survey trust question - global expectations vs. local beliefs," Economics Working Papers 2015-19, Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University.
    • Handle: RePEc:aah:aarhec:2015-19
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    7. Frans van Winden, 2021. "The Informational Affective Tie Mechanism: On the Role of Uncertainty, Context, and Attention in Caring," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 21-012/I, Tinbergen Institute.
    8. Abhijit Ramalingam & Brock V. Stoddard, 2020. "Old habits die hard: The experience of inequality and persistence of low cooperation," Working Papers 20-07, Department of Economics, Appalachian State University.
    9. Seng Boon Lim & Jalaluddin Abdul Malek & Tan Yigitcanlar, 2021. "Post-Materialist Values of Smart City Societies: International Comparison of Public Values for Good Enough Governance," Future Internet, MDPI, vol. 13(8), pages 1-13, August.
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Corruption; Social Capital; Social Norm; Trust Games;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior
    • C92 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Group Behavior
    • D03 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Behavioral Microeconomics: Underlying Principles

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