Trust Building via Risk Taking: A Cross-Societal Experiment*

relations has largely been overlooked in the burgeoning literature on trust in the social sciences (Cook 2001; Hardin 2002); yet it is central to understanding how trust develops. In the absence of monitoring and the sanctioning of opportunistic behavior, trusting always involves some risk.1 We define trust building as the process through which social interaction opportunities involving risk are transformed into trust relations in which the people involved come to trust each other and honor that trust. How does this happen? We argue that a series of risk-taking behaviors is indispensable to building a trust relation (Blau 1964; Holmes and Rempel 1989). In a typical trust-building scenario, two people realize that they can potentially gain from engaging in social exchange. The exchange may take the form of a date, a pleasant conversation, or even a business transaction. Each party knows that he or she Social Psychology Quarterly 2005, Vol. 68, No. 2, 121–142