The cognitive consequences of trust and distrust on the way information is memorized and integrated: Psychological and economic perspectives.

• Applicant: Dr. Ann-Christin Posten
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: from 2013 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 249195622

Trust and distrust are core elements of human social life. Whenever humans engage in interpersonal interactions, they experience a varying degree of trust. The level of trust experienced has been found to affect the way information is cognitively processed. In general, trust fosters routine information processing whereas distrust fosters non-routine information processing. One information processing strategy that is affected by trust and distrust is comparative thinking. Comparisons may be carried out with two alternate processing foci: A focus on similarities, which constitutes the default, and a focus on dissimilarities. This may have important implications on the way information gets cognitively represented. Processing dissimilarities of entities leads object representations to be perceived as more dissimilar from each other. On the one hand, dissimilar representations may enhance memory performance because of an increased ability to distinguish individual memory contents. On the other hand, dissimilar information is hard to integrate into one coherent picture. To be able to find underlying structures and to integrate information, it is rather helpful to focus on similarities. In line with this reasoning, trust and distrust should differentially influence memory performance and information integration by inducing a similarity- vs. dissimilarity-focus. Particularly, distrust should induce a dissimilarity-focus that in turn enhances memory performance. In contrast, trust should induce a similarity-focus that in turn increases the abilities to from coherent representations of the world. Both abilities -- the ability to memorize as well as the ability to integrate information -- may prove to be beneficially for the respective states of distrust versus trust. This is the case because by increasing one's memory abilities distrust may also lead to a better memory for cheaters, enhance one's own abilities to consistently convey misleading information, and increase one's detection rate of lies. Complementary, by increasing one's abilities to form a coherent representation of the surrounding, trust may lead to more accurate representations of the surrounding world. This should also show in economic decisions. The goal of the present research is to test for these intriguing possibilities. Nine experiments are outlined to shed some light on a) the way trust and distrust relate to memory performance, b) trust and distrust influence information integration, and c) how these proposed mechanisms may prove to be functional in economic judgments.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: USA
• Host: Professorin Dr. Francesca Gino