What's in a name? Subliminally activating trusting behavior

Li Huang and John Murnighan

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2010, vol. 111, issue 1, 62-70

Abstract: Because the choice to trust is inherently risky, people naturally assess others' trustworthiness before they engage in trusting actions. The research reported here suggests that the trust development process may start before the conscious assessment of trustworthiness, via the activation of a relational schema. We present three experiments that examined the automatic, non-conscious activation of interpersonal trusting behavior via a variety of subliminal cues: positive or negative, relational or non-relational, and trust-related or not. In all three studies, subliminal relational cues influenced subsequent trusting behavior, apparently without conscious awareness. Results from the third study also indicated that subliminal relational cues that were specifically trust-related influenced trustors' expectations of the likelihood of reciprocity. Overall, the data provide initial evidence that the development of interpersonal trust can start before and beneath conscious awareness.

Keywords: Trust; Relational; schema; Relational; cues; Subliminal; priming; Automaticity; Nonconsciousness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749-5978(09)00100-9
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jobhdp:v:111:y:2010:i:1:p:62-70

Access Statistics for this article

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes is currently edited by John M. Schaubroeck

More articles in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().