  Large amounts of evidence suggest that trust levels in a country are an
important determinant of its macroeconomic growth. In this paper, we
investigate one channel through which trust might support economic performance:
through the levels of patience, also known as time preference in the economics
literature. Following Gabaix and Laibson (2017), we first argue that time
preference can be modelled as optimal Bayesian inference based on noisy signals
about the future, so that it is affected by the perceived certainty of future
outcomes. Drawing on neuroscience literature, we argue that the mechanism
linking trust and patience could be facilitated by the neurotransmitter
oxytocin. On the one hand, it is a neural correlate of trusting behavior. On
the other, it has an impact on the brain's encoding of prediction error, and
could therefore increase the perceived certainty of a neural representation of
a future event. The relationship between trust and time preference is tested
experimentally using the Trust Game. While the paper does not find a
significant effect of trust on time preference or the levels of certainty, it
proposes an experimental design that can successfully manipulate people's
short-term levels of trust for experimental purposes.
