This paper measures the social capital of trust and trustworthiness in
South Africa using an experimental protocol designed to distinguish these
norms from altruism. Experimental participants played multiple roles,
making it possible to construct theoretically-grounded norm measures based
on an individual’s play across roles. Two-stage estimates of a social interaction
model of norms identi…es the presence of endogenous social effects,
indicating that communities can be meaningfully typi…ed as having
and maintaining distinct normative environments. However, in contrast
to studies that rely on less direct social capital measures, we do not …nd
that trust boosts mean household living standards when controlling for the
endogeneity of norms.