Familiarity and Trust: An experimental investigation

In Zimbabwe, people in resettled villages trust each other less than people in nonresettled villages. This does not appear to be due to differences in socially transmitted rules of behaviour. Further, there are good reasons to believe that it is not due to the self-selection of a particular type of person into resettlement. Rather, the variations appear to be due simply to a lack of familiarity and to the consequentially greater uncertainty faced by resettled villagers when trying to predict each other’s behaviour in strategic situations.