Probing the Links Between Trustworthiness, Trust, and Emotion: Evidence From Four Survey Experiments

An outstanding puzzle in the social sciences remains about the forms of perceived trustworthiness sufficient to produce trust. Survey experiments adjudicated between four models of the trustworthiness-trust link—social constraints, encapsulated interests, goodwill, and virtuous dispositions—and tested novel hypotheses about other-praising emotions (admiration and gratitude) as mediating effects. Two large convenience samples of Amazon.com Mechanical Turk workers yielded strong support for all four perspectives as well as novel predictions about the inequality of effects (goodwill = virtuous dispositions > encapsulated interests > social constraints). Two additional large random samples of public university undergraduate students replicated prior findings and provided evidence for other-praising emotions as plausible mechanisms that connect trustworthiness to trust, with larger mediating effects for goodwill and virtuous dispositions than for encapsulated interests and social constraints. Results indicate that trust can spring from multiple forms of perceived trustworthiness and that affective mechanisms play an important role in its development.