The trust building process is basic to social science. We investigate it in a laboratory setting using a novel multi-stage trust game where social gains are achieved if players trust each other in each stage. And in each stage, players have an opportunity to appropriate these gains or be trustworthy by sharing them. Players are strangers because they do not know the identity of others and they ...

I had some difficulty with both the subject and the title, bearing in mind that this oration is a welcome to the new students to the Hospital. It is common practice to deliver a lecture of some historical interest, often on one's specialty. I have resisted that for three reasons. Firstly, Dr Reginald Hall has dealt with the history of dermatology in an earlier paper in a most distinguished mann...

We report data from laboratory experiments where participants were primed using phrases related to markets and trade. Participants then participated in trust games with anonymous strangers. The decisions of primed participants are compared to those of a control group. We find evidence that priming for market participation affects positively the beliefs regarding the trustworthiness of anonymous...

The formation of the national identity is determined by the process of comparing “yourself” with “the other”. The feeling of the national identity is fixing the differences “our – strangers”, “ours – not ours”. When the ethnic culture is formed there is an intensive process of self-reflection, self-identification, “the image of yourself” is made up in relation to the “images” of other people, c...

This article contributes, in two ways, to our understanding of the nature, scope, and significance of conversations between strangers in service environments. First, a framework is introduced that provides both academics and practitioners with a summary of the key issues associated with the stimuli, manifestations, and consequences of such conversations. Second, the article reports a market-ori...

Humans regularly help strangers, even when interactions are apparently unobserved and unlikely to be repeated. Such situations have been simulated in the laboratory using anonymous one-shot games (e.g., prisoner's dilemma) where the payoff matrices used make helping biologically altruistic. As in real-life, participants often cooperate in the lab in these one-shot games with non-relatives, desp...

Adults prefer to interact with others that are similar to themselves. Even slight facial self-resemblance can elicit trust towards strangers. Here we investigate if preschoolers at the age of 5 years already use facial self-resemblance when they make social judgments about others. We found that, in the absence of any additional knowledge about prospective peers, children preferred those who loo...

What makes money essential for the functioning of modern society? Through an experiment, we present evidence for the existence of a relevant behavioral dimension in addition to the standard theoretical arguments. Subjects faced repeated opportunities to help an anonymous counterpart who changed over time. Cooperation required trusting that help given to a stranger today would be returned by a s...