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...people positively reciprocal, rewarding kind actions by others, or be negatively reciprocal, punishing others for unkind actions, even when these reciprocal actions are costly and contrary to own material self-interest (for a survey, see Fehr and Gachter 2002). There is little evidence, however, on the prevalence and determinants of these traits in the general population. Exploring these issues requires leaving the laboratory and using a large, representative survey that includes measures of trust, positive reciprocity, and negative reciprocity. In this paper, we pursue this line of research using data from a representative survey of roughly 22,000 adults living in Germany. Information on trust and reciprocal tendencies is accompanied by extensive socio-economic information and also by psychometric measures of an individual's personality type (the so-called "Big Five").
Our first set of results comes from a comparison of the distributions for trust, positively reciprocal inclinations, and negatively reciprocal inclinations. Our findings indicate substantial heterogeneity in trust, consistent with previous survey evidence on trust (e.g., Alesina and Ferrara 2002; Bellemare and Kroger 2006). To our knowledge, ours is the first evidence from a large survey on the prevalence of negative and positive reciprocity. The prevalence of reciprocal types in the population, however, is one crucial factor for predicting the impact of institutions and whether reciprocal or selfish types dominate market equilibrium outcomes (see, e.g., Falk and Fischbacher 2006). We find that moderate to strong positive reciprocity is the norm, whereas negative reciprocity is relatively more heterogeneous.
We next explore how trust and reciprocity are related. Positive reciprocity and negative reciprocity turn out to be only weakly correlated for individuals, which suggests that these are distinct traits rather than two sides of the same coin. This finding is relevant for models of fairness preferences. We also find that people who are strongly negatively reciprocal are less willing to trust. This is consistent with negatively reciprocal types being those who are most upset by betrayal. It implies that while negatively reciprocal individuals may contribute to a climate of trust in a population, by credibly threatening to punish opportunistic norm violators (see the discussion in Fehr and Gachter 2002), they may be less trusting themselves. We find only a very weak positive correlation between trust and positive reciprocity. Thus, people who trust are not necessarily those who are trustworthy.
We also investigate determinants of individual differences in trust and reciprocity, focusing on factors that are exogenous to the individual: gender, age, and height. These characteristics have a significant impact on trust and reciprocity, but the effects vary in interesting ways, providing further indication that these are distinct traits. The exogenous factors remain significant when we control for a wide variety of other observable characteristics. Finally, we provide the first survey evidence on how trust, positive reciprocity, and negative reciprocity relate to personality type, as measured by the standard Big Five scale from psychology. Mapping personality measures from psychology into measures of economic preferences is an important but largely unexplored avenue for research on economic decision making (Heckman, Stixrud, and Urzua 2006). We find that the psychometric measures do have predictive power for both trust and reciprocity.
The next section describes the data. Section III presents results on prevalence and the relationship between trust and reciprocity. Section IV explores determinants of social preferences, and Section V concludes.
II. DATA
Our data come from the 2003 and 2005 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). The SOEP is...
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