Cross-cultural trust and cooperation are important concerns for international markets, political cooperation, and cultural exchange. Until recently, this problem was difficult to study under controlled conditions due to the inability to conduct experiments involving interaction between participants located in physically distant locations. We…

An important unanswered question in the empirical literature on trust is whether trusting begets trustworthiness. In two experimental games, with Japanese and American participants, respectively, we compared trust and trustworthiness to provide an answer to this question. The trustee in the standard Trust Game knows that he or she is trusted,…

The role of risk taking in building trust relations has largely been overlooked in the burgeoning literature on trust in the social sciences; yet it is central to understanding how trust develops. We argue that a series of risk-taking behaviors is indispensable to building a trust relation. We conducted experiments in Japan and the United States…