Risk Taking and Trust Building
To trust a stranger is risky, but if we never took that risk, we would never know whether the stranger was trustworthy or not. Toshio Yamagishi of Hokkaido University received an award to study the role of risk-taking in building trust. He will run a series of experimental games, in which players profit if their trust is reciprocated, but lose out if their trust is abused. Players who take a chance on someone else may lose out in the short run, but they may do better over time— both because they discover more trustworthy people, and because their initial gesture of trust invites trustworthy behavior in return.