title: Take the Money and Run: Psychopathic Behavior in the Trust Game.
abstract: We study the association among different sources of individual differences such as personality, cognitive ability and risk attitudes with trust and reciprocate behavior in an incentivized experimental binary trust game in a sample of 220 (138 females) undergraduate students. The game involves two players, player 1 (P1) and player 2 (P2). In the first stage, P1 decides whether to trust and let P2 decide, or to secure an egalitarian payoff for both players. If P1 trusts P2, the latter can choose between a symmetric payoff that is double than the secure alternative discarded by P1, and an asymmetric payoff in which P2 earns more than in any other case but makes P1 worse off. Before the main experiment, we obtained participants' scores for Abstract Reasoning (AR), risk attitudes, basic personality characteristics, and specific traits such as psychopathy and impulsivity. During the main experiment, we measured Heart Rate (HR) and ElectroDermal Activity (EDA) variation to account for emotional arousal caused by the decision and feedback processes. Our main findings indicate that, on one hand, P1 trust behavior associates topositive emotionalityand, specifically, to the extraversion'swarmthfacet. In addition, the impulsivity facet ofpositive urgencyalso favors trust behavior. No relation to trusting behavior was found for either other major personality aspects or risk attitudes. The physiological results show that participants scoring high in psychopathy exhibit increased EDA and reduced evoked HR deceleration at the moment in which they are asked to decide whether or not to trust. Regarding P2, we find that AR ability and mainly lowdisagreeable disinhibitionfavor reciprocal behavior. Specifically, lack of reciprocity significantly relates with a psychopathic, highly disinhibited and impulsive personality. Thus, the present study suggests that personality characteristics would play a significant role in different behaviors underlying cooperation, with extraversion/positive emotionalitybeing more relevant for initiating cooperation, and lowdisagreeable disinhibitionfor maintaining it.
authors.affiliation: Department of Basic and Clinical Psychology, Universitat Jaume ICastelló, Spain; Centre for Biomedical Research Network on Mental Health, Instituto de Salud Carlos IIIMadrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Manuel I
authors.initials: MI
authors.lastname: Ibáñez
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Experimental Economics and Economics Department, Universitat Jaume I Castellón, Spain.
authors.forename: Gerardo
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Sabater-Grande
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Experimental Economics and Economics Department, Universitat Jaume I Castellón, Spain.
authors.forename: Iván
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Barreda-Tarrazona
authors.affiliation: Department of Basic and Clinical Psychology, Universitat Jaume I Castelló, Spain.
authors.forename: Laura
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Mezquita
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Experimental Economics and Economics Department, Universitat Jaume I Castellón, Spain.
authors.forename: Sandra
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: López-Ovejero
authors.affiliation: Department of Basic and Clinical Psychology, Universitat Jaume I Castelló, Spain.
authors.forename: Helena
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Villa
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Experimental Economics and Economics Department, Universitat Jaume ICastellón, Spain; Centro de Investigación Mente, Cerebro y Comportamiento, Universidad de GranadaGranada, Spain.
authors.forename: Pandelis
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Perakakis
authors.affiliation: Department of Basic and Clinical Psychology, Universitat Jaume ICastelló, Spain; Centre for Biomedical Research Network on Mental Health, Instituto de Salud Carlos IIIMadrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Generós
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Ortet
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Experimental Economics and Economics Department, Universitat Jaume I Castellón, Spain.
authors.forename: Aurora
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: García-Gallego
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Experimental Economics and Economics Department, Universitat Jaume ICastellón, Spain; School of Agriculture, Policy and Development, University of ReadingReading, UK.
authors.forename: Nikolaos
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Georgantzís
keywords: behavioral economics; experiment; personality; psychopathy; risk attitudes; trust game