Hi there, in the previous video, we looked

at the centrality of trust in society,

and we saw there was a link between
interpersonal trust and generalized trust.
We looked at the concept of social
capital and the ideas of bonding and
bridging capital.
In this video, we're going to
see how social scientists have
tried to measure trust
in different societies.
We'll look at some
psychological experiments, and
we'll explore the trust question and
explain the concept of sampling to you.
That's quite an agenda.
Now if trust is central to
the formation of society and
if it's evident that there are different
levels of trust in different societies,
well, social scientists
will want to measure it.
Now one way is through social
psychological experiments.
Now in 1993, researchers at
University of Minnesota devised
a trust game and
tested it with 32 pairs of students.
All the students were given a fee of $10
for participating in the experiment.
Half of the students were taken
to separate rooms and told that
they could keep their fee, but if they
wanted, they could give some of it away.
Whatever they gave away would be
trebled and given to a stranger,
who'll be told where it came from, and
who could return some if he wanted to.
Now these strangers were the second group
of students, also in separate rooms.
They also had had their fee.
But they were now given extra
from their unknown partner, and
we're told they could keep some of it or
return some of it.
So let's have a look at the results.
The students started with $10,
and on average gave away $5.15.
This meant that the receiving group
got something over 15, $15.50.
The average amount they returned,
however, was only $4.66.
Only 40% of the first group received
a positive payback from their gift.
The rest lost out.
When the experiment was repeated, but
this time telling all the participants
the results of the previous run,
the amounts gifted increased slightly.
But the payback now swung

into positive territory,

climbing up to just under $6.50.
The researchers suggested that the
different outcomes could be explained by
the fact that the first experiment relied
purely on socialized norms of behavior,
those inherent in the students.
Where as in the second experiment,
they'd actually learned and were able to
make strategic calculations, and
this led to an increase in mutual trust.
Now, variants of this game
has been played ever since.
Usually beginning by asking participants
if they trust other people and
linking this to their observed behavior.
But before leaving this experiment,
let's have a look at a couple of points.
The results differ if the sums
involved were larger.
The results were also different
if the participants were
drawn randomly from the population.
The students knew that the other
group were also students, and
this probably influenced their behavior.
And finally, the calculation
need not always enhance trust.
In one variant of the game, the sum given
away was not returned to the individual,
was put into a common pot from
which they would all benefit,
rather like voluntary form of taxation,
which would be spread out afterwards.
The game is then played in several rounds,
and
the results are announced
after each round.
Now as the game progresses, what's
interesting is the amount being given
decreases, and those that give
absolutely nothing actually increases.
In other words, they're avoiding paying
taxes and allowing others to do so.
Our second trust experiment is
known as the dropped wallet test,
devised by The Reader's Digest.
In 1996, they dropped a dozen wallets
in each of 20 European cities,
to see how many would be returned.
Each wallet contained $50 in
local currency, an address card,
a family photograph,
as well as other personal items.
It's subsequently repeated this
experiment in different locations.
Most recently in 2013,
when it visited 15 different world cities.
Let's look through the results.
Helsinki came out best with 11

of the 12 wallets returned hm,

Scandinavian cities generally
do well in these tests.
Next came Mumbai, with nine, followed
by Budapest, New York, with eight each.
Amsterdam and
Moscow followed with seven apiece.
Thought, I often wonder how
Amsterdam would have done if
we used unlocked bicycles
instead of wallets.
Berlin and Ljubljana came next with six.
And after that, you've got a less than
50/50 chance of seeing your wallet again.
So let's run through the rest.
London and Warsaw has five each,
Bucharest, Rio and Zrich had four each,
Prague had three, and at the bottom of the
list, Madrid returned only two wallets.
Since 1996, social scientists have
dropped wallets all the place,
which is quite expensive actually,
bearing in mind that there's less than
a 50/50 chance of ever seeing it again.
Social scientists though have
gotten around this problem
by asking people whether they expect
to have their wallets returned and
measuring the results that way.
Saves a lot of money.
Now actually asking people is
the more usual approach to
ascertaining knowledge about trust.
In 1956, a social scientist
Morris Rosenberg devised what
has become the standard trust question.
It goes as follows.
Generally speaking, would you say
that most people can be trusted or
you cannot be too careful when
dealing with other people?
Since 1981,
this trust question has been included in
what is known as a world values survey.
These surveys ask about a thousand
respondents in a whole host of
countries a series of questions on their
attitudes on a range of social issues.
There've been six waves of this survey so
far.
The results of the most recent
one were published in April 2014.
Now the next question we need to ask is
whether experiments with 12 wallets or
30 pairs of students or
even a thousand respondents can actually
say something about a country as a whole.
And the answer is yes.
And you get it by what we call sampling.
First of all,

you have to define a population.

Now this is a statistical term
meaning the entire entity.
This case,
it actually is the adult population.
Now during sampling, it is any subgroup
should show the same characteristics as
the population as a whole.
But the sample must be of sufficient size,
and it must be random.
Let's take an example.
For sake of argument, assume that society
is made up equally of men and women.
Choose four people at random, and
you should get two men and two women.
But you could get three men and one woman.
The sample is simply too small.
But choose 100 people at random, and you
should get close to 50 men and 50 women.
You might get 49, 51 or even 52, 48.
So there's always a margin of error or
a confidence level in your results.
So you can ask a population
whether it trusts other people or
whether it shouldn't be too careful
when dealing with other people.
To sum up, in this video,
we looked at two trust experiments.
We introduced the trust question, and
we've discussed the idea of sampling.
In the next video,
we'll look at the results, and
we'll see how reliable they are.