Trust: A Social Cognition Perspektive
Economic Theory
Final Report Abstract
We conducted the current research program to shed light on the motivational and social-cognitive underpinnings of trust and distrust experiences and their relation to social and economic behavior, respectively. Following recent methodological developments in psychology and social psychology, in particular, we invested a great deal of time to critically re-evaluate previous methods, and consequently develop new experimental paradigms. Building on this preliminary work and novel methodological approaches, we were able to identifiy a host of important motivational and social-cognitive underpinnings of experiencing trust and distrust. These range from the basic motivation to increase predictability of one’s surrounding to people’s inclination to seek and rely on social comparisons as a means to inform judgments about themselves. Likewise, trust and distrust shape how people reason about minds of others, and whether or not they see minds where there actually are none. Extending the various effects of trust and distrust on how people attend to their social surroundings, we also explored how trust and distrust influence self-related judgments––such as people’s tendency to judge their own moral transgressions more leniently than those of other people (i.e., moral hypocrisy). Such dissociations between self-related and other-related judgments as a consequences of experiencing distrust, in turn, are grounded in basic motivational states enabling distrustful individuals to protect themselves from exploitation. Going beyond this perspective of trust and distrust as antecedents of human motivation and cognition, we also examined the experiences of trust and distrust as outcome variables. For instance, narcissistic personality traits shape how much people trust and distrust others––a finding that corroborates the general notion that trust and distrust differentially shape self-related and other-related information processing. Importantly, the current social-cognitive perspective on trust entails significant implications for social and economic behavior. How we frame economic decisions––as frequently investigated in experimental games in the laboratory––, for example, critically shapes people’s experiences of trust and distrust. Our results suggest that economic games, by themselves, frame the decision contexts in ways that affect belief formation and thus behavior. This is an important new insight, as it goes well beyond the kind of ‘content framing’ typically studied in economics. Empirical challenges and methodological changes within psychology notwithstanding, the social-cognition perspective on trust adopted in the current research allows to draw a more complete picture of the basic psychological mechanisms that are triggered by trust versus distrust. Our research thus sheds lights on important questions at the intersection of psychological and economic methodology and research.
Publications
- (2018). Distrusting your moral compass: The impact of distrust mindsets on moral dilemma processing and judgments. Social Cognition, 36(3), 345-380
Conway, P., A. Weiss, P. Burgmer, and T. Mussweiler
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2018.36.3.345) - (2018). Two-faced morality: Distrust promotes divergent moral standards for the self versus others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
Weiss, A., P. Burgmer, and T. Mussweiler
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167218775693)
