Trust Test: What You Extend and What You Return

Online test of trust from both sides at once. Five scales — generalised trust, caution, betrayal sensitivity, your own reliability and trust in institutions — plus three tasks with a real decision in them: the classic trust game played as the sender and as the receiver, and a measurement of how much more a risk costs you when a person creates it instead of a coin. The headline is not one score but the gap between the trust you extend and the trust you repay.

How to take the test

Answer the statements

Rate how well each one describes you. The full version is 32 screens, about 6 minutes; the short one is 14. There are no right answers, and nobody but you sees them.

Play the trust game from both chairs

First decide how much to send a stranger, knowing it will triple on the way. Then take their seat: money arrived, it tripled — how much do you send back?

Name your price of betrayal

The same risk twice: first a coin decides the outcome, then a person does. The difference between your two answers is the price of betrayal.

Find out whether the trust you hand out matches the reliability you hand back

Loading the test…

Features

Two headlines instead of one "trustingness"

Somebody who extends a lot and repays little is not the same person as somebody who trusts nobody but returns every penny. A single scale prints the same verdict for both; here they get different results.

Your reliability is measured, not asked about

The trust game is played from both chairs. How much of the tripled pot you hand back is the only honest answer to "can you be trusted" — the direct question measures nothing.

Checked against 23 000 real decisions

Both halves are read against Johnson and Mislin (2011): 162 replications, senders give about 50% and receivers return about 37% of the tripled amount.

The price of betrayal, separated from the price of risk

The same gamble resolved by a coin and by a person. In the research people accept a lottery at 37% odds but demand 54% when a person could let them down — you see your own gap.

Caution is not treated as the opposite of trust

Yamagishi's key result: trust and caution are separable, and high-trust people are better at spotting the untrustworthy. "Open and checking" is the good cell here, not a contradiction.

A validity block instead of a flattering verdict

Impression management and careless-responding indices are reported back to you. Reliability is the most socially desirable thing on this test, so behaviour outweighs words.

What the test gives you

Two independent numbers: the trust you extend and the reliability you return
The gap between them as the headline, not a footnote
Your trust-game decisions against the averages from 162 experiments
How much more a risk costs you when a person creates it rather than chance
Five scales measured apart, including caution as a trait in its own right

How the result is built

Trust combines generalised trust with how much you sent: behaviour weighs 60%, words 40%. Reliability combines self-rating with how much you returned, and there behaviour weighs 70% — "I am a reliable person" is the most desirable statement on the test. Both sides are expressed as distance from their own published mean, which is the only thing that makes "how much I sent" and "how much I returned" comparable. Weights and the 0-100 mappings are our display convention anchored on published means, not population norms.

Frequently asked questions

What is the trust game?

The classic experiment by Berg, Dickhaut and McCabe (1995). You hold a sum and decide how much to send a stranger. Whatever you send triples, and then they decide how much to return. Sending a lot only pays if they turn out decent — which is why the decision measures trust rather than arithmetic. The second player's answer measures their trustworthiness.

Why am I asked to play both sides?

Because that is the point of the test. Asking "are you a reliable person?" is useless — almost everybody says yes. How much you return out of a tripled pot, when keeping all of it costs you nothing, is the real answer. The two halves give two independent numbers, and the interesting thing is the gap.

Is caution the same as distrust?

No, and that is the confusion this test works hardest to avoid. Yamagishi showed that generalised trust and caution are separable: high-trust people are not naive — they are better at spotting the untrustworthy, because they deal with more people. High caution alongside high trust is the healthiest combination, and the result says so.

What is the price of betrayal?

Bohnet and Zeckhauser (2004) posed the same risk twice: once resolved by chance, once by another person who could let you down. On average people accepted the lottery at 37% odds but demanded 54% when a person created the risk. The difference is the price not of risk but of the possibility of being betrayed.

How solid is that finding?

The effect itself has replicated many times, but its interpretation is contested: Fetchenhauer and Dunning (2020) doubt that fear of betrayal is what actually drives trust toward strangers. We show your gap and say so plainly rather than selling the effect as settled.

How long does it take?

The full version is 32 screens, roughly 6 minutes. The short one is 14 screens and about 3 minutes with two items per scale, so the result page marks it as a rougher read. Answers are saved on this device, so you can stop and come back.

Is this a psychological diagnosis?

No. It is a self-knowledge instrument built on published scales, not a clinical assessment. Use it on yourself, not on other people.

Where do my answers go?

They stay in this browser and you can wipe them with "Start over" and "Clear history". A share link carries the numeric scores only.

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Who is this tool for?

🎓 Students 🧘 Wellness & Meditation

Published 07 Aug 2026 Updated 20 Aug 2026 Author: The Supreme