Trust: A Social Cognition Perspective

Principal Investigators: Thomas Mussweiler, Axel Ockenfels

Trust is the social glue that brings and keeps people together. When people trust each other, they are more likely to seek company, to share or trade resources, and to cooperate. Trust and its counterpart distrust are core elements of human life that shape almost all social and economic interactions. Despite its obvious importance for human interaction, however, we know very little about the psychological underpinnings of trust vs. distrust, and about what they mean for economic decision-making. How, for example, does the experience of trust vs. distrust influence basic motivational orientations, how does it shape the ways in which humans seek, attend to and process social and economic information, and how does trust vs. distrust affect decision-making? Psychological and behavioral economics research to date remains silent on these important questions. The goal of the present project is to fill this void. We will examine the motivational and the social cognitive underpinnings of trust vs. distrust and explore their consequences for social and economic behavior. More specifically, we will explore how the experience of trust vs. distrust shapes fundamental motivational orientations of approach vs. avoidance. We will further explore how the experience of trust vs. distrust influences the seeking and use of social vs. self-based information. This will allow us to examine how trust vs. distrust shapes fundamental constituents of human social life, including social influence, social comparison, perspective-taking and negotiation. In sum, we will draw a more complete picture of the basic psychological mechanisms that are triggered by trust vs. distrust. Our research is characterized by the interplay of psychological and economic methods and research questions, and thus allows to develop a social-cognitive perspective on trust that sheds new light on the various economic and context-specific research applications of our research unit.