On the interpretation of world values survey trust question: global expectations vs. local beliefs

Abstract

How should we interpret the World Values Survey (WVS) trust question? We conduct an experiment in India - a low trust country - to correlate the WVS-trust question with trust decision in an incentivized Trust Game. Evidence supports findings from one strand of the fractured literature: the WVS-trust question captures expectations about others’ trustworthiness. We further show that the WVS-trust question correlates with stable beliefs about how trustworthy people in general are. However, when subjects go through a treatment induced negative experience, WVS-trust question does not capture the immediate fluctuation in belief about trustworthiness anymore. One implication of our study is that survey based methods may not be appropriate to measure beliefs induced by a short term psychological perturbation.