Is participation in high-status culture a signal of trustworthiness?

Publisher: Public Library of Science Country of Publication: United States NLM ID: 101285081 Publication Model: eCollection Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1932-6203 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 19326203 NLM ISO Abbreviation: PLoS One Subsets: MEDLINE

Original Publication: San Francisco, CA : Public Library of Science

Trust*; Cooperative Behavior ; Culture ; Games, Experimental ; Group Processes ; Humans ; Interpersonal Relations ; Social Class

Trust is essential for social interactions, cooperation and social order. Research has shown that social status and common group memberships are important determinants of receiving and reciprocating trust. However, social status and group membership can coincide or diverge-with potentially different effects. Our study contributes to the existing literature on the role of status and group membership by testing two separate trust-generating mechanisms against each other. We examine if individuals tend to place trust in high-status groups (irrespective of their own group membership) or, rather, if they tend to trust others with whom they share a common group membership. We assume that status group membership is signalled by cultural (musical) taste. This operationalization follows the theoretical reasoning of Bourdieu who argues that it is, above all, musical taste that classifies persons of different status. By demonstrating their "legitimate" cultural taste, upper-class members distinguish themselves from the middle and lower classes and signal their social status, thereby creating awe, respect and an air of trustworthiness. We report evidence from online experiments with incentivized trust games, which enable us to separate the two trust-generating mechanisms. We find no evidence that persons with "legitimate" tastes are generally trusted more. Instead, our results clearly demonstrate ingroup favouritism towards persons with a similar taste. Participants place more trust in members of their own group and expect them to be more trustworthy. In other words: members of taste-based groups trust each other more than members of different-taste-based groups. Interestingly, this group-based trust is not always justified inasmuch as received trust is not necessarily reciprocated more strongly by own group members. This suggests that ingroup favouritism is, at least in part, driven by false beliefs.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

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Date Created: 20200506 Date Completed: 20200804 Latest Revision: 20200804

20240105

PMC7199962

10.1371/journal.pone.0232674

32369510