Do elicited promises affect people's trust? —Observations in the trust game experiment

Abstract Promises and promise keeping play an important role in our daily life as well as in various economic situations, but maybe not all promises are voluntary and spontaneous. We examine experimentally the impact of elicited promises on trust and cooperation using the trust game. We find that, in general, elicited promises have no significant influence on the trust and trustworthy behavior. When subjects are classified into different social preference types, we find that promises can increase the amount returned by selfish types and decrease the amount returned by reciprocal types. Moreover, we analyze promise keeping and its influence factors. The results show that elicited promises are not very credible. When we exclude the observations where trustees receive nothing, about 41% of trustees break their promises. Promise keeping is also relevant to subjects’ social preferences.