Trust, Gender and Social Capital: Experimental Evidence from Three Western European Countries

The economic literature has discussed the links between trust and gender, and trust and social capital. Given that some empirical evidence shows also that gender and trust are somehow related and specifically women tend to trust less than men, I try to investigate the effect of social capital on generalized trust, controlling also for the “gender effect”. This latter could be due to the fact that women are less prone to invest in social capital than men, as the literature highlights. Using the tools of experimental economy, I performed the same experiment in Oslo, Leuven and Torino, in order to obtain a mixed Western European sample. In this one I included Scandinavia, Central and Mediterranean Europe. My measure of social capital is more complete than the usual one: I add informal networks (such as phone conversations, time spent with friends, etc.) to formal ones (basically voluntary associations). Analysing the obtained results through both comparisons of conditional means and econometrics, I find out some influence of social capital on trust. Furthermore, also after controlling for social capital, gender differences persist still. Thus I can conclude that behavioural differences due to gender are not a mere reflex of different investments in social capital. I also found evidence that some kinds of formal and informal networks exert positive influence on generalized trust.