Source : Social Psychology Quarterly 2005,Vol. 68, No. 2, 121–142

The role of risk taking in building trust relations has largely been overlooked in the
burgeoning literature on trust in the social sciences; yet it is central to understanding
how trust develops.We argue that a series of risk-taking behaviors is indispensable to
building a trust relation.We conducted experiments in Japan and the United States to
examine the independent and cross-cultural effects of risk taking on trust building.The
results of these experiments indicate that the American participants took more risks
than did the Japanese, supporting the general claim that Americans are inclined toward
risk taking and trust building. Even so, the Americans were no better than the Japanese
at improving the level of cooperation. The cumulative results of these experiments
imply that risk taking is a critical element in trust building for Americans, but less so for
the Japanese. Our results show clearly that it is important to distinguish trusting behavior
from cooperation and to measure them separately if we are to study trust and trust
building in relation to social cooperation.