19
to part time in the context in which they interact with the trustor, are more trustworthy
is harder to explain.
That no evidence of insider bias was found during the analysis suggests that within the
context of study there is a fair degree of tolerance between individuals of different
ethnicity, religion, and sex.
Of course, these results may be subject to omitted variable bias and should be treated
with some caution. This, along with the problems of multicolinearity described in
section 4 above, are the primary shortcomings of this analytical approach. They derive
from the reduction in experimenter control associated with shifting the focus of
analysis from experimentally constructed and restricted information sets to naturally
constructed and potentially unbounded information sets. The potential impact of these
shortcomings on the conclusions we can draw from this analysis is difficult to
quantify and, this being the case, it may be appropriate to view this approach as a
complement to rather than a substitute for the more controlled approach taken in
earlier studies. The best next step in the analysis of biases in trust might be to treat the
findings of this investigation as hypotheses in a laboratory experiment involving
experimentally constructed information sets that include data on some of the trustee
characteristics that have been identified as important above.
Convention