Influence of subliminal stimuli on interpersonal trust: A possible mechanism

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate whether subliminal stimuli can influence interpersonal trust and to explore the mediating mechanisms. Participants were required to do a lexical decision task while the "trust" or "suspicion" Chinese words were embedded as the subliminal stimuli. Afterward, they played a trust game and reported person and situation perception. Results indicate that compared with exposure to "suspicion" subliminal stimuli, exposure to "trust" subliminal stimuli significantly improved interpersonal trust. Furthermore, person perception mediated the influence of subliminal stimuli on interpersonal trust, but situation perception did not. The results suggest that subliminal priming techniques can influence interpersonal trust, and such impact is mediated by person perception.

The effect of subliminal priming on team trust: The mediating role of perceived trustworthiness

“…Specifically, after the concept of trust (vs. suspicion) was subliminally primed, participants invested more (vs. less) tokens in the public account. It was consistent with previous results regarding the impact of subliminal priming on interpersonal trust (Huang and Murnighan, 2010;Posten et al, 2014;Cai et al, 2020), which possibly suggested that the effect was consistent across different types of trust. This finding was also consistent with the idea that cognitive content can be unconsciously activated and guide behavior outside of conscious awareness (Rusbult and Van Lange, 2003).…”

“…Smeesters et al (2009) concluded that priming effects on behavior in interpersonal contexts were mediated by interpersonal perception. Additionally, Cai et al (2020) found that the perception of the other partner played a mediating role between the prime and interpersonal trust behavior as measured in the donations in the trust game. Following the view that team perception is shaped by the interaction of individuals in the team (Pype et al, 2018), and combined with the evidence that team trust and interpersonal trust share the same conceptual structure (Rousseau et al, 1998;Fulmer and Gelfand, 2012), we speculated that team perception (Mayer et al, 1995) can also mediate subliminal priming and team trust.…”

“…With this in mind, rich theoretical and empirical pieces of evidence on subliminal priming have been accumulated (Collins and Loftus, 1975;Cohen et al, 1988). Moreover, research has found that subliminal priming can affect interpersonal trust (Huang and Murnighan, 2010;Posten et al, 2014;Cai et al, 2020). Previous research showed that "interpersonal trust is directed toward a specific target and team trust refers to trust in a collectivity of interdependent people pursuing a shared goal with inherently unique dynamics."…”

The impact of subliminal stimuli on interpersonal trust and team trust

“…Specifically, participants primed with the Chinese word “信任 [trust]” showed a higher subjective trust and behavioral trust than participants primed with the Chinese word “怀疑 [suspicion].” These results were consistent with previous findings in the West (Huang & Murnighan, 2010; Posten et al, 2014). Further, compared to Cai et al's (2020) study, this experiment demonstrated the effectiveness of subliminal stimuli for subjective trust. In other words, the effects of subliminal stimuli were manifested not only at the behavioral level but also at the subjective level.…”

“…Posten et al (2014) used the German word for “trust” or “distrust” as a subliminal stimulus to explore its effect on behavioral trust (trust game). Their results revealed that behavioral trust increased when the subliminal stimulus was “trust” but decreased when the subliminal stimulus was “distrust.” Cai et al (2020) used the Chinese word for “trust” or “distrust” as a subliminal stimulus and found preliminary evidence for the effect of subliminal stimuli on behavioral trust (trust game) in the Chinese environment.…”