Trust Game And Its Discussion Of The Results

Investment game designed by Joyce Berg, John Dickhaut and Kevin McCabe is played with two groups of PSME students, one composed by Fudans and another by Non-fudans. And each group has two teams of players.Basically, this game is about trust and reciprocity. Players in team A decide how much of their show up fee to send out to their partners, who they do not know. The amount of money sent out demonstrates their belief of trustiness towards team B. Afterwards, each euro sent will triple when it goes to players in team B, then players in group B decide how much to send back. The amount sent back symbolizes their intentions to reciprocate. Observed decisions of the first round suggest that trust does exist in social interactions and subjects tend to reciprocate in both groups. The second rounds of both groups show subjects'adjustment of expectation depending on their experience. These results inconsistent with "rational" theory lead to compulsory analysis from different perspectives of different levels, such as "Mentalizing", "Reason VS Emotion", "More sophisticated reasoning" at individual level, some other perspectives at social relationship level and social system level.Results from the game throw light upon the fact that the positive impacts of trust on economic growth dominate those negative ones in most economies. Hence, while facing up to the trust crisis of China, it is fairly beneficial to find ways to cope with it.