Abstract
In this paper, we discuss one of the major factors in social capital, the issue of trust, in terms of detection of trustworthiness of others. Yamagishi's Emancipation Theory of Trust concluded that high trusters, or people who have a high level of general trustfulness toward others, have social intelligence to accurately detect the general character of others. Kikuchi, Watanabe, and Yamagishi's Detection Experiment provided the empirical basis of such a conclusion. However, the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) Game adopted in the Detection Experiment did not necessarily use appropriate alternatives of behaviors for participants as indicators of the general characters of people. Consequently, the results from the experiment are not appropriate for reviewing the ability to “detect a particular person's general character.” In order to overcome such problems and to measure the ability to detect a person's trustworthiness more appropriately, we conducted a laboratory experiment by adopting the game of enthronement. After a series of analyses, we could not confirm such a relationship between trustfulness and the ability to detect trustworthiness as discussed in a series of studies by Yamagishi. On the other hand, after reviewing the relationship between breadth of beliefs about others and the ability to detect trustworthiness of others based on Kelley and Stahelski's Triangle Hypothesis in a traditional PD game study, we could confirm that it is a person's assumptions or beliefs about internalization of social norms by others that determine the accuracy of his/her ability to detect trustworthiness of others.
