Faith - an empirical study of expectations of unconditional other-regarding preferences

Expectations of unconditional other-regarding preferences have shown to be important for trust game behavior and can be seen as expectations of generosity or fairness. In this thesis these expectations are captured in the variable faith. A plausible mechanism between faith and trust is developed in line with the findings of Holm and Danielson (2005). An experiment revealing faith and a standard set of survey questions regarding trust is then examined in order to study the predictive power of surveys for faith. The results show that people who donate money expect others to be generous and individuals who engage in several risky activities have higher faith. The result suggests that questions related to these findings should be incorporated with standard questions when combining trust experiments and surveys. The result also shows that faith is better predicted by variables measuring behavior rather than attitudes