Many human groups achieve high levels of trust and cooperation, but these achievements are vulnerable to exploitation. Several theorists have suggested that when groups impose costs on their members, these costs can function to limit freeriding, and hence promote trust and cooperation. While a substantial body of experimental research has demonstrated a positive relationship between costs and cooperation in religious groups, to date, this relationship has not held for secular groups. Here we extend this line of research by comparing trust and cooperation among 11 secular groups, including four U.S. Greek fraternities that impose high costs on their members. We find that although fraternities impose greater costs on their members than social clubs, fraternities and social clubs do not significantly differ in their levels of intra-group trust. Moreover, variation in costs does not explain variation in trust among fraternities. We suggest that the lack of an evident relationship between costs and trust in our results is because secular groups, unlike religious groups, lack repeated rituals that are coupled with supernatural ideologies. We conclude by suggesting possible avenues for future research.

中文翻译：

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成本不能说明世俗组织之间的信任

许多人类团体获得了高度的信任与合作，但是这些成就容易受到剥削。几位理论家认为，当团体向其成员施加费用时，这些费用可以起到限制搭便车的作用，从而促进信任与合作。尽管大量的实验研究表明，成本与宗教团体之间的合作之间存在正相关关系，但迄今为止，这种关系还不适用于世俗团体。在这里，我们通过比较11个世俗组织之间的信任与合作，扩大了这一研究范围，其中包括美国四个希腊兄弟会对其成员造成了高昂的成本。我们发现，虽然兄弟会给会员带来比社交俱乐部更大的成本，但兄弟会和社交俱乐部在集团内部信任水平上并没有显着差异。而且，成本的变化并不能解释兄弟之间信任度的变化。我们认为，在成本和对结果的信任之间缺乏明显的联系是因为世俗群体与宗教群体不同，缺乏重复的仪式以及超自然的意识形态。最后，我们提出了未来研究的可能途径。