How trust in social dilemmas evolves with age

While trust and trustworthiness provide a fundamental foundation
for human relationships, little is known about how trusting and
trustworthy behavior in social dilemmas is related to age and
aging. A few papers use data from surveys such as the World Values
Survey to address a potential connection between trust and age. In
this chapter, we will mainly focus on trusting and trustworthy
behavior elicited with the use of the seminal trust game (Berg et
al., 1995) and with games implementing a similar incentivized
interaction structure. The results suggest that trust and
trustworthiness increase with young age until adolescence.
Trustworthiness reaches the level of adults at an earlier age (at
around 15-16 years of age) than trusting behavior (around
adulthood). Survey results differ from incentivized experiments
when it comes to a potential development of trust in adulthood. The
former indicate a steady rise in trust levels at a small rate when
becoming older, whereas the latter show a decline, starting at an
age of about 60 years.