Trust, Reciprocity and the Roles of Sex, Value Orientation and Risk Attitudes in an Investment Game

An investment game is used to generate indices of trust and reciprocity from 182 young adults. The raw data indicate that men are more trusting than women and responders return a larger share of their resources to more trusting senders than to less trusting senders. Sex differences do not account for variation in reciprocity. When the value orientations and risk attitudes of participants are introduced into a model to account for the variation in trust they replace sex as the significant explanatory variables. When value orientations are introduced into the reciprocity model, it interacts significantly with the trust index to increase the explanatory power of the model.