When does a person who has been trusted reciprocate that trust? Kiyonari, Yamagishi, Cook, and Cheshire (2006) compared behavior in trust games and faith games and showed that in one-shot games, players who were trusted did not reciprocate that trust. In an experiment using trust games and dictator games, we examined what type of trust would elicit reciprocation of that trust by the trustee. In the experiment, information about the reason to trust the truster was manipulated to separate trust types into “trust attributable to the trustee” and “trust attributable to the truster.” We determined how much reciprocation was elicited by each of these types of trust. The results showed that trustees are more likely to reciprocate trust for “trust attributable to the trustee” than for “trust attributable to the truster.”
This study used an on-line method to explore whether the perception of irony occurs before considering common ground between speaker and listener. In Experiment 1 and 2, the shared common ground between the speaker and the listener was manipulated, and a meaningfulness-decision task was conducted immediately after the presentation of ironical utterances. The results showed that a priming effect was obtained only when common ground was shared by the speaker and the listener when utterances were presented with long duration (1800 ms). When utterances were presented with a short duration (1000 ms), however, priming effects were obtained regardless of the common ground. In Experiment 3, no priming effect was obtained when the contexts were presented without the utterances. The results suggest that ironic meaning is activated from an egocentric perspective at an early stage of processing and is inhibited at a later stage if it is not intended.
Sperber and Wilson (1981) proposed that the speaker who uttered the expectation that is contradicted by irony is identified as the victim of the irony by the echoic mention of his/her utterance. We conducted two experiments to explore whether the victim of irony is identified by echoic mention. Experiment 1 examined the validity of this hypothesis using three conditions. In the Hearer (H) echo condition, the speaker who is echoed is the hearer of the potential irony. In the No-Hearer (NH) echo condition, the speaker who is echoed is not the hearer of the potential irony. The third condition is the no-echo condition. The result supported the hypothesis. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the H echo factor and the NH echo factor in 4 conditions. The results replicated Experiment 1, and showed that the NH is identified as the victim of irony more than the H. These results suggest that echoic mention and also status in the discourse are factors in the comprehension of irony.