Egocentric foundations of trust

Abstract

Trusting the trustworthy brings benefits whereas trusting the untrustworthy brings harm. Discriminating between the two is key to every social encounter. We propose that humans turn to internal information, namely the self, when judging the trustworthiness of others. Simulating how oneself would behave in situations that involve trust helps to predict how a counterpart may behave. Importantly, using the same self as a basis for judgments about others may result in diverging outcomes, depending on how the information is processed. If a judge focuses on similarities between the self and the target person, the judge expects the counterpart to act alike. However, if a judge focuses on differences, the target is expected to behave in ways opposite to the self. In Study 1 natural variations in self-ascribed levels of trustworthiness correlate positively with expectations of a target person's trustworthiness. Inducing a similarity-focus increases this correlation as compared to a difference-focus. Interestingly, this effect holds even if information speaks to the target's trustworthiness. In manipulating the perception of the participants' own trustworthiness as well as the processing focus, Studies 2-4 demonstrate that when individuals focus on similarities, those who perceive themselves as highly (vs. less) trustworthy perceive others as similarly highly (less) trustworthy. However, when they focus on differences, the reverse pattern tends to occur. These effects hold for trust judgments (Study 2-3) and trust behavior in an economic game (Study 4). Together, these findings demonstrate that trust involves egocentric inferences that are flexible enough to adjust for basic social relations.

Stronger Conspiracy Beliefs are Associated with a Stronger Tendency to Act Dishonestly and an Overestimation of Others’ Dishonesty

“…Conversely, it is also plausible that individuals prone to dishonesty may be more susceptible to conspiracy theories, a tendency attributed to "social projection", where people ascribe their own traits to others (Cho & Knowles, 2013). Experimental evidence has demonstrated that individuals often rely on their own behavior as a reference point to predict the trustworthiness of others (Posten & Mussweiler, 2019). Consistently, past research has shown that people with higher willingness to conspire have higher levels of belief in conspiracy theories (Douglas & Sutton, 2011).…”

Identifying with an avatar face changes perceptual representation of one’s real face

“…The modulation of trust with another individual, known to be closely related to conceptual similarity between self and other (e.g. Fischer, 2009;Posten & Mussweiler, 2019), has been shown to affect the perceived physical similarity between one's self and the other individual. Farmer and colleagues (2014) showed that when participants learned to trust an individual, they perceived their own face to be more similar to the face of that individual.…”

Who's a yea‐sayer? Habitual trust and affirmative response behaviour

“…However, there might be more parsimonious explanations for our findings. First, perceiving a person as trustworthy often means also to perceive the person as similar to oneself (Farmer et al., 2014; Posten & Mussweiler, 2019). Similarity in turn leads to assimilation (Mussweiler, 2003), and thus, potentially, to affirmative answering.…”