THE ROLE OF INTERPERSONAL TRUST IN LARGE-SCALE VOLUNTARY COLLECTIVE ACTION DILEMMAS. New cross-sectional and experimental insights to antibiotics use in Sweden

Abstract: What is the role of interpersonal trust in large-scale voluntary collective action dilemmas? Many of the most pressing issues facing humanity are collective action problems, which require cooperation to be resolved. Previous studies have found that voluntary cooperation in small-scale dilemmas is possible when interpersonal trust between actors is present. However, there is a gap in our understanding whether interpersonal trust affects individual voluntary cooperation in large-scale dilemmas. Testing whether interpersonal trust has this link, and furthermore, effect on cooperation is applied to the case of antibiotics use in Sweden, which is a type of collective action dilemma. This study is separated into two parts where one examines stated behavior among individuals in Sweden using SOM-data. The second is a survey-experiment of anticipated stated behavior among Swedes using the Laboratory of Opinion Research (LORE). Using logistic regression, interpersonal trust was found to have a positive relationship with cooperation, even when controlling for other factors. The following survey experiment showed that information on the cooperativeness of others result in an increasing likelihood to abstain antibiotics. The results from the experiment indicate an interesting relationship, even if support for the hypothesis was not found. With unique data on a Swedish sample, this study contributes to the understanding of the role of interpersonal trust for individual voluntary behavior in large-scale collective action dilemmas such as antibiotic use.