Increasing interpersonal trust through divergent thinking.

Roberta Sellaro,Erik W De Kwaadsteniet,Suzanne Van De Groep,Bernhard Hommel,Lorenza S Colzato

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00561

Abstract

Interpersonal trust is an essential ingredient of many social relationships but how stable is it actually, and how is it controlled? There is evidence that the degree of trust into others might be rather volatile and can be affected by manipulations like drawing attention to personal interdependence or independence. Here we investigated whether the degree of interpersonal trust can be biased by inducing either a more integrative or a more focused/exclusive cognitive control mode by means of a creativity task requiring divergent or convergent thinking, respectively. Participants then performed the trust game, which provides an index of interpersonal trust by assessing the money units one participant (the trustor) transfers to another (the trustee). As expected, trustors transferred significantly more money to trustees after engaging in divergent thinking as compared to convergent thinking. This observation provides support for the idea that interpersonal trust is controlled by domain-general (i.e., not socially dedicated) cognitive states.

Highlights

Increasing evidence suggests that the degree to which people trust others can vary
As we have demonstrated elsewhere, tasks tapping into convergent thinking are associated with a sort of “exclusive” thinking while tasks tapping into divergent thinking are associated with a more “inclusive/integrative” thinking style (Fischer and Hommel, 2012; Hommel, 2012)
This suggests that the two creativity tasks established different control states, which again had a different impact on the degree to which participants trusted others

Summary

Introduction

Increasing evidence suggests that the degree to which people trust others can vary. Evidence for inter-individual variability comes from intercultural and religious studies, which revealed that interpersonal trust is stronger in collectivistic cultures than in individualistic cultures that emphasize the independence of self and other (for an overview see Buchan et al, 2002). Drawing participants’ attention to either personal interdependence (e.g., by instructing them to circle all relational pronouns in a text, such as “we,” “our,” and “us”) or independence (by having them to circle pronouns such as “I,” “my,” and “me”) has been demonstrated to modulate the degree of interpersonal trust (Maddux and Brewer, 2005), increasing and decreasing the effect, respectively. Colzato et al (2013a) demonstrated that interpersonal trust can be enhanced by administering the food supplement L-tryptophan, the biochemical precursor of serotonin

Methods

Results

Conclusion