Reciprocity, trust, and the sense of control - A cross-societal study

Most cognitive approaches for explaining cooperation in Prisoner's Dilemma games include the view that many people believe that mutual cooperation is generally a gainful strategy to all parties and will cooperate when they think their partner cooperates. Proceeding along these lines, we argue that many participants treat a Prisoner's Dilemma game as an assurance game, and respond in a reciprocal manner to the choice or expected choice of their partner. We examine two bases for the expectation of a partner's cooperation in one-shot games: 'general trust' and a 'sense of control'. Further, we discuss why we expect general trust and a sense of control to play different roles in societies, particularly in Japanese society and American society. Specifically, we test a general hypothesis that a sense of control plays a relatively more important role as a foundation for expectations in Japanese society and general trust plays the more important role in American society.