Abstract
AbstractPrevious research has shown that the completion of basic perceptual processes is intrinsically pleasant. In the absence of diagnostic and objective cues to trustworthiness, nondiagnostic factors such as positive affect can incidentally lead to reported and behavioral trust. On the basis of these two premises, it was tested whether positive affect from the completion of perceptual processes has implications for the formation of trust in first‐time business‐consumer interactions. We tested this hypothesis in four experiments, using the famous Kanizsa illusion as an exemplary perceptual process that has been shown to trigger positive affect. We found that participants trusted companies who featured a Kanizsa shape as their logo more than companies with closely matched logos that did not allow for the completion of a basic perceptual process. This was evident on self‐reported (Experiment 1) as well as behavioral (Experiments 2–4) measures of trust. This effect even persisted under incentivized conditions (Experiment 4) and was partially mediated by the intrinsic pleasantness of perception (Experiment 3). These findings for the first time demonstrate that positive affect is not the only consequence of perception, but rather has further trickle‐down consequences for social judgments and economic decision making. Perceptual illusions seem to elicit illusory trust. Therefore, these novel findings bear important implications not only for both logo design and marketing but also for consumer decision making.
Highlights
Trust is commonly defined as “the willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectations that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor or to control that other party” (Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995, p. 712)
A preference for contourmatched over perceptually matched control stimuli was observed. Significant in both cases, the preference for Kanizsa stimuli over contour-matched stimuli was smaller than for perceptually-matched controls. This is of lesser theoretical interest, it is in line with previous research showing that inverted Kanizsa shapes can lead to visual disappointment when contrasted with “real” Kanizsa shapes (Erle & Topolinski, 2019)
Experiment 2 again demonstrated that participants develop illusory trust in companies that feature a Kanizsa shape in their logo
Summary
Trust is commonly defined as “the willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectations that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor or to control that other party” (Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995, p. 712). Trust is commonly defined as “the willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectations that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor or to control that other party” As decisions based on trust always involve risk, trustworthiness is a universally admired quality in both informal and professional contexts such as business relations (Huang & Wilkinson, 2013; Jaeger, Sleegers, Evans, Stel, & van Beest, 2019). Behaving in a cooperative and reciprocal manner breeds trust. In most cases, establishing trust by such means takes time and necessitates the interaction partner's capacity to encode that one behaved in a trustworthy manner
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