Abstract

Yamagish and others distinguish two bases for the formation of participant's expectation of a partner's cooperation in one shot Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) game: "general trust" and "an illusion of control." Following their methodology, we hypothesize that illusion of control plays a relatively more important role and general trust plays a less important role in Korean society in the context of a cross-society comparison of Korea, Japan and the US. This hypothesis is based on a prevailing presumption claiming that, while the Korean society resembles the Japanese society in many ways, Korea is a low trust society unlike Japan. Our experimental outcomes fail to validate such a perception. General trust in Korea is found not to be low, contrary to the findings of previous surveys outcome. Reasons behind the discrepancy between our findings and previous studies and perceptions are discussed.