Accessing the Role of Trust Profiles for the Economic Growth of Societies: A Stochastic Rule-Based Simulation Using the Prisoner's Dilemma Game

According to Robert Putnam, trust can be a proxy for social capital. Thus, a higher societal trust could be related to economic growth. To test this hypothesis, we simulated the association between trust and economic growth in two artificial societies. One artificial society (New Zealand) exhibited higher levels of initial trust, and the other (Argentina) had lower levels of trust. Initial starting points for simulations were set using representative survey data (using the global trust inventory). Computational simulation relied on a rule-based model (RBM), integrating time through a stochastic simulation algorithm implemented in PISKaS. Agents in the artificial societies were distributed according to proportions of four trust profiles, with more high trusters (HTs) in New Zealand. In each iteration, the agents played a prisoner's dilemma, earning or losing money according to different payoff matrices, cooperation probabilities, and interaction frequencies, modeling different conditions for economic exchange. We analyzed the economic performance of each country, together with the performance of each trust profile. Results support the notion that societies with high trust perform economically better, on average, than those with low trust, but only if interaction frequency is held constant. Despite the relevance of HTs for economic development, their performance is tightly linked to the type of society in which they interact: they prosper more in a Rule of Law society, and where HTs are more common, compared with a predators' paradise, where the sucker's payoff is more punitive.