Behavioral plasticity and personality traits in Trust Game

In a recent paper, Ferguson, Heckman and Corr (2011) propose an integrative framework for incorporating concepts and methods from biology, evolutionary theory and economics to address key issues in personality psychology. In this study, we tackle one of the topics posed in the paper: ”the expression of behavior associated with traits across contexts”. Specifically, we examine the relationship between personality traits and behavioral plasticity. 216 undergraduate students completed the Trust Game across three conditions: neutral, cooperative-equality and cooperative-unequality. In addition, the participants filled out the NEO-FFI and completed the Dot-Matrix-Test. We observed significant correlations (p