Magdalena Schwarz, @thematzing & Niki Ritt ask why do we trust others? Between kin it makes sense, but what how is trust maintained in non-kin within cooperative groups? Or even with strangers?
#Protolang7
#Protolang7
Hypotheses on this involve social bonds, reputatio, gossip and 3rd party punishment that all help maintain trust. But what about strangers?
For strangers, symbolic tags can help identify whether they are trustworthy (e.g., wearing same clothes as ones own group). But free-riders could easily imitate this tag. Speech, or more specifically accent might be a more reliabl marker that is very hard to fake (Cohen 2012)
Accent is salient, discriminable, and comparable across individuals. And it is universal (everyone has one, every language has variation). From this and socioling research we can generate the prediction that we trust those who speak like us more.
Schwarz et al tested this with an artificial language game to test whether we trust members of our group more whhen making costly decisions and how linguistic markers compare to other tags. (similar to @garicgymro 's work)
In the game you play a trust game with 2 diff. aliens. You win if you both trust each other, but you can lose a lot if you are wrong. On avg participants send more money to aliens with the in group marker both for linguistic and visual markers (tho small effect size and high var)
So there is some evidence that we do trust those more who speak like us, although most participants did not discriminate. Why the effect is quite small in this artificial setup is unclear, so the result should be replicated and explored under more conditions.
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