Intra-generational trust-a semi-experimental study of trust among different generations

From a public database in Sweden we obtained a subject pool consisting of one group of 20 years old and another group exactly 50 years older. The groups participated in a mail-based trust game, in which the young cohort exhibited more trust than the older one. Subjects significantly preferred to place trust in co-players of their own cohort and of the female sex. When amounts sent and proportions returned in the mail-based game are compared with other trust games conducted in standard laboratory environments, it is found that the mail-based game does not seem to generate extreme distributions.