You and me: The influence of personality on the trust process in (un)trustworthy, (un)familiar interactions

Abstract

The trust process has been researched extensively. However, one under-researched aspect is the influence of individual differences on trust-relevant criteria in interactions comprising familiar versus unfamiliar partners who are (un)trustworthy. The present work manipulated both partner trustworthiness and familiarity in a mixed-design, examining the influence of propensity to trust and risk aversion in an in-person, collaborative task. Using a growth modeling approach, this work examined the influence of propensity to trust and risk aversion on the intercept and slope variance, respectively, of criteria of interest. Results demonstrated propensity to trust accounted for trustors’ intercept variance for benevolence and integrity perceptions, regardless of whether they knew the trustee. However, risk aversion did not predict criteria of interest. The results speak to the importance of assessing individual differences in psychological experiments investigating the trust process, motivating future work to further investigate the degree to which a trustor is familiar with the trustee and increased monetary risk in dyadic interactions.