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Big Five personality factors in the Trust Game

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Abstract

Growing interest in using personality variables in business and economic research has led to the question of whether personality, as measured by psychology, is useful to predict behavior. While personality can undoubtedly influence large-scale outcomes, it is less clear if personality variables can also be used to understand micro-behavior in games. We experimentally test the impact of personality factors (measured using the Big Five model) on behavior in the Trust Game. Overall, we find that personality can contribute to explaining the behavior of the first player, the trustor, whereas, the behavior of the second player, the trustee, cannot be explained by their personality. In fact, the trustee’s behavior is instead affected by the first player’s behavior, i.e., the second player’s response depends on whether or not the first player has trusted the second player.

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Notes

  1. See for example Barrick and Mount (1991), Mueller and Plug (2006).

  2. The HEXACO model of personality belongs to the group of general measures as defined in Sect, 2. The acronym HEXACO stands for Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, eXtraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience.

  3. Exceptions to this can be found in research on organizational behavior, whereby the locus of control or conscientiousness has been linked to individual performance, turnover decisions, etc.  (e.g. Judge and Bono 2001; Allen et al. 2005; Dudley et al. 2006).

  4. The larger experiment consisted of two sessions with experiments. The Trust Game was the first game in the second session. Further games played were a competition game and a risk elicitation task (used as a control) (see Müller and Schwieren 2012), an ultimatum game, and a large-scale investment game (the results were not usable due to a programming problem).

  5. For filling out the personality questionnaires, the subjects did not have a fixed appointment, but they were allowed to drop by the laboratory on three different given days between 9 am and 6 pm to individually fill out the questionnaires. We used a seminar room adjacent to the laboratory, and a student assistant stayed in the room the whole day to hand out the questionnaires and to monitor the subjects. Filling out the personality questionnaires took subjects about two hours.

  6. The full instructional material for the Trust Game can be found in Appendix A.

  7. The participants received a one-time payment of €14 for filling out the personality questionnaire and in each of the two sessions an appearance fee of €5.

  8. We used neutral wording for the instructions and avoided words like “trust”.

  9. There are other labels for the five factors; we use the labels in Costa and McCrae (1992).

  10. For further details regarding the Big Five Personality Model and for definitions of the factors, see Table 1.

  11. See Appendix 2 for the factors of the Big Five Model and its facets.

  12. In the beginning of each session, subjects had to generate their identifying code consisting of letters (for example a letter of their mother’s first name) and numbers (for example their birthday). Although the code generated by a person is unique, some of the codes in the experiment were not. For this reason we could not match the personality scores for some of the participants.

  13. The usual results are that Player 1 sends on average half of his endowment and this trust is not fully repaid by Player 2 (e.g. Camerer 2003).

  14. For descriptive statistics of the personality scales, see Table 7 in Appendix B.1.

  15. Using Sidak corrections instead of Bonferroni does not change our results.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Ulrike Basten, Christian Fiebach, and Christine Stelzel for helpful comments and suggestions. Financial support from the START-Professorship of the University of Heidelberg of the DFG Initiative of Excellence is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Organisational Economics, University of Münster, Scharnhorststr. 100, 48151, Münster, Germany

    Julia Müller

  2. Alfred-Weber-Institute for Economics, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany

    Christiane Schwieren

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Appendices

Appendix 1: The Trust Game

1.1 Instructions

These instructions have been translated into English from the original German.

In this game you will play together with one other person in the laboratory. You are either Player A or Player B. This will be randomly determined by the computer. The other person (A or B) with whom you will play will also be randomly assigned by the computer.

Both Player A and B receive 10 experimental currency units (ECU). Player A can decide whether he would like to send any ECU to Player B and if so, how many (only integer amounts are possible). The amount of ECU that Player A sends to Player B is tripled. Consequently, Player B receives three units for each unit sent by Player A. Afterwards, Player B decides whether he wants to return any ECU to Player A and, if so, how many. These units will not be tripled. This is the end of the game.

The experimental currency is converted into Euros as follows: 1 ECU = 0.30 Euro.

If you have any questions regarding these instructions, please raise your hand and one of the experimenters will come to answer your questions.

Appendix 2: The Big Five personality model

1.1 Descriptive statistics of the personality scales

In Table 7 the descriptive statistics of the Big Five Personality Model are displayed.

Table 7 Descriptive statistics of the personality scales
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1.2 Factors and facets

In Table 8 the five factors and the names of all facets are summarized.

Table 8 Names of the factors and facets
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Müller, J., Schwieren, C. Big Five personality factors in the Trust Game. J Bus Econ 90, 37–55 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11573-019-00928-3

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