Yamagishi, Toshio, Masako Kukuchi, and Motoko Kosugi. 1999. Trust, Gullibility and Social Intelligence. Asian Journal of Social Psychology 2(1): 145-161.
A series of experiments
conducted in Japan by Yamagishi and his associates are presented, all
consistently showing that high trusters (as measured with a general trust
scale) are more sensitive than low trusters to information potentially
revealing lack of trustworthiness in others and judge other people’s choice in
a one-shot prisoner’s dilemma more accurately. Based on these findings, a new
theoretical twist is introduced to the ‘‘emancipation theory of trust’’
originally proposed by Yamagishi & Yamagishi (1994), that emphasizes the
relationexpansion role of trust in addition to the traditionally noticed
relationfortification
role of trust. When opportunity cost for staying in a commitment relation is
generally high, it is more advantageous not to stay in secure and stable
commitment relations but to explore opportunities that lie outside, and yet
such social exploration involves the risk of being exploited by untrustworthy
people. It is thus a more gainful strategy to invest ‘‘cognitive resources’’ in
the nurturing
of ‘‘social intelligence’’ needed to detect signals of untrustworthiness.
General trust may be conceived as a by-product of the development of such social
intelligence. Those who have invested in the development of social intelligence
can afford to maintain a high level of general trust, whereas those who have
not are encouraged to assume that ‘‘everyone is a thief’’ and to refrain from
pursuing potentially lucrative but risky outside opportunities