Does Gneezy's cheap talk game measure trust?

•We examine the interpretation of behavior of receivers in Gneezy's cheap talk game.•When receivers choose senders' recommended option, it has been interpreted as trust.•The results indicate that the receivers' behavior should not be interpreted as trust.

In recent years, researchers have used Gneezy's cheap game to measure trust. In this paper, we examine the interpretation of trust in Gneezy's cheap talk game. In his game, the behavior of receivers has been described as trusting if they choose the option recommended by the sender. We report three studies using Gneezy's cheap talk game. In the first one receivers were given the option of buying information on previous game behavior of their sender. In the second study, the actions of the receivers were compared to their answers on the World Values Survey question on trust; and in the third study, a target-specific measure of trust was compared to the actions of the receivers. In these three studies, we find evidence that casts doubt on the use of Gneezy's cheap talk game as a behavioral measurement of trust in economic experiments.