Trust in the Tropics? Experimental Evidence from Tanzania

Undergraduates in Tanzania were exposed to one Trust game, one Dictator game and a standard set of survey questions relating to trust. We demonstrate that the survey questions neither predicts trust behavior nor trustworthiness as previously claimed by Glaeser et al. (2000). It is also shown that donation motives play an important part in the proportion returned by the second player in the Trust game and that survey answers are correlated to donations in the Dictator game. These aspects have often been neglected in previous research.