Review of the Social Capital Literature - University of Queensland

others as mean, selfish or unreliable. This measure consists of items describingperceptions of specific hypothetical interpersonal situations, rather than askingrespondents to describe their own general behaviour.Among the more specific social capital measures of trust a common approachhas been to utilise GSS survey data. Various studies have used data relating tothe questions in this survey relating to trust, in attempts to obtain a generalisedview of the general climate of trust in a community. The two items mostfrequently used are‘Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted, or that youcan’t be too careful in dealing with people?’‘Do you think most people would try to take advantage of you if they got achance, or would they try to be fair?’Examples of research using this measure of trust include Kawachi, Kennedy etal. (1997) and Kennedy, Kawachi et al. (1998) (see section 4 below).Another specific attempt to measure trust as a component of social capital hasbeen to use an experimental method. Glaeser et al attempt to do this byconducting experiments with monetary awards in order to measure trust andtrustworthiness (Glaeser, Laibson et al. 2000).Survey questions were asked of a sample of Harvard undergraduates, coveringdemographic and behavioural questions, as well as attitudinal and self-reportedbehavioural measures of subjects’ trustfulness and trustworthiness. This wasfollowed by participation in two ‘trust’ games. The first experimental trust gameinvolves subjects working in pairs. The first subject is given the opportunity tosend their partner an amount of money between 0 and 15 dollars. This chosenamount is doubled by the experimenter, and given to the second player. Thesecond player may then return money back to the first player. Glaeser et albelieve that the amount sent by the sender is a na tural measure of trust, as thesender trusts the recipient to return a fair share of the amount sent. They alsobelieve that, controlling for the amount sent, the amount returned is a measure oftrustworthiness.In the second experimental game, subjects report valuations for a series of‘envelope drops’. Envelopes, containing $10 and addressed to the subjects, willbe dropped by the experimenters in different public places and under differentconditions. For each place and condition the subject reports a valuation. If a highvalue is placed on the dropped envelopes, the researchers inferred that thesubject was more likely to trust strangers to return the envelopes.The results showed that standard attitudinal survey questions about trust predicttrustworthy behaviour in the experiments much better than they predicted trustingFebruary 2001 DRAFT ONLY 14