Trust, Truth, Status and Identity an Experimental Inquiry Trust, Truth, Status and Identity an Experimental Inquiry *

In an experiment involving a standard trust game and a costless signalling game, it is demonstrated that economically relevant norm-based behaviors (trust, reciprocity and truth-telling) vary with social identity. The experimental procedure induced two trivial social identities. In one version, a status difference was induced. The results permitted a succinct description of identity effects: subjects held own-group members to a higher standard; and high status subjects held everyone, including themselves, to a higher standard. To illustrate the “high status/high standards” phenomenon, subjects’ “standards” were estimated from a simple identity model for a subset of the data. ∗This paper comprises a portion of my doctoral dissertation, completed at the University of California, Berkeley. This version is as of October 2008. I owe a great debt of gratitude to George A. Akerlof, Stefano DellaVigna, Steven Marc Goldman, Shachar Kariv, Ulrike Malmendier and John Morgan for many helpful comments and discussions. I am also grateful to to the National Science Foundation under Research Grant SES 04-17871 and UC Berkeley’s X-lab for invaluable financial support.