In the study, researchers from the University of Oxford and the European University Institute, Italy, asked participants who had no face-to-face contact to play a series of interactive games.
They had to make decisions about whom to trust in their dealings with other players, based on information they were given on the level of these other players' generosity in previous games.
The experiments found that participants who had been mean with their money were trusted less, and indeed were more likely to be untrustworthy.
The experiments involved a total of 265 Oxford University students. First, participants played the Dictator Game, where they were put into pairs, and in each pair one was given 8 pounds.
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In the second stage of the experiment, participants played the Trust Game. In this game, the players were again put into pairs but with a different partner. Then, one player could first decide whether to keep or send money to their partner.
Sending the money would multiply the amount, but now their partner could either send a larger share back in return, or simply pocket the money.
However, before the first player decided whether to send the money, he or she received information about what the other player had done in the Dictator Game. The players could truthfully reveal, hide or lie about whether they had been generous or mean.
While the researchers informed some players about the rules of the Trust Game before they played the Dictator Game, others were kept in the dark. This allowed the researchers to assess whether players might be strategic in choosing to be generous in the first game.
The researchers found that past displays of generosity are widely regarded as a key attribute when we are looking for indicators of trustworthiness and other information about a person's reputation is not available.
The findings are published in the journal PLOS One.