Intra-Generational Trust - a Semi-Experimental Study of Trust Among Different Generations

From a public database in Sweden we obtained a subject pool consisting of one group 20 years old and another group that was exactly 50 years older. The groups participated in a mail-based trust game. In the trust game the young cohort exhibited significantly more trust than the old cohort did. Furthermore, subjects preferred to place trust in co-players of their own cohort. When amounts sent and proportions returned in the mail-based game are compared with other trust games conducted in standard laboratory environments it is found that the mail-based game does not seem to generate extreme distributions.