Experimental Study Of Individual Trust Behavior In Social Network

According to social network theory,individuals are always embedded in social network when they make decisions.Any decision of individuals will be restricted by the surrounding social value,and the position of the individual in the social network will also make difference.So,because of the social structure effect,the interactions between individuals are not simple rational game anymore.In addition,individuals adjust their own opinions when they interact with other people,they will collect information and make utility modification during the interaction process.For this reason,social network and the interaction pattern behind the economical activities has provoke the interests of researchers.At the same time,it is proposed that trust what is the foundation of all economical activities will also be influenced by social network.However,the concrete impact mechanism and the influential factor still need in-depth investigation.In order to comprehend individuals' trust behavior and try to explore the approach to improve trust level in the social network,we take individual trust behavior as the research object.We applied laboratory experimental research method to explore the effect of social network on individual trust behavior as well as the mechanism of the effect.Social network is simulated in the laboratory,and subjects are recruited to participate in the trust experiment.On the basis of the literature review,we decided to select three essential factors as the primary variables which are the social network structure,the relationship between individuals in the social network,and disclosure status of identity and action in the social network.Firstly,the effect of social network on individual's trust behavior is analyzed.As we know,the classical BDM trust game experiment is a two-node structure which contains just one trustor and one trustee.Take a tree-node structure which contains one trustor and two trustees as the simplest social network structure,we expand the classical BDM trust game into a social network view.Through the compare of individual trust behavior between two-node structure and three-node structure,we get some evidence that social network do have effect on individual's trust and trustworthiness by changing the exchange structure.According to the result of the non-parametric test of the mean comparison and the regression,trust level is higher in a three-node network structure than in the classical two-node structure.At the same time,trustor's attitude to risk and trustor's social status have positive effect on trustor's trust level.Those who prefer risk seems to be more trust.However,we don't get the evidence to show that trustworthiness of trustees under two kinds of structure is significantly different.Secondly,we explore the social distance effect on trust behavior in the case of social network frame.We expand our trust experiments to the situation that is closer to the real world,the trustor face two trustees with whom have different social relationship truly,thus the two trustees have different social distance with the same trustor.As the experimental results show,when one of the two trustees is a real friend of the trustor instead of two of them are strangers,the trustor would like to send more points to each of them.From another prospect,when the two trustees are strangers to trustor,the trustor seems to send similar points to the two trustees,however,when the two trustees consist of one friend and one stranger,and once the trustor make a cooperation with one trustee,he will send significant different points to them.Finally,we also consider the information disclosure effect on trust behavior.Based on the experimental design of three-node game and social distance factors,we control the decision information of trustees,those for the trustor,there is existing obvious information asymmetry.The results show that the trustee who is a stranger to the trustor will make different decisions under different information disclosure situation.When the return points by trustees can be observe respectively,the stranger will perform more gently in order to get the trust by the trustor,thus his trustworthiness is comparatively high.While when the return points cannot be acquire clearly by the trustor,the strangers tend to hidden their behaviors,decrease their return points.Which is inspiring that the friend trustee seems perform gently with the similar return points in two cases,they display the higher trustworthiness than the strangers.