Trustworthy Tricksters: Violating a Negative Social Expectation Affects Source Memory and Person Perception When Fear of Exploitation Is High.

Philipp Süssenbach,Mario Gollwitzer,Laura Mieth,Raoul Bell,Axel Buchner

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.02037

Philipp Süssenbach, Mario Gollwitzer + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.02037

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Abstract

People who are high in victim-sensitivity—a personality trait characterized by a strong fear of being exploited by others—are more likely to attend to social cues associated with untrustworthiness rather than to cues associated with trustworthiness compared with people who are low in victim-sensitivity. But how do these people react when an initial expectation regarding a target’s trustworthiness turns out to be false? Results from two studies show that victim-sensitive compared with victim-insensitive individuals show enhanced source memory and greater change in person perception for negatively labeled targets that violated rather than confirmed negative expectations (the “trustworthy trickster”). These findings are in line with recent theorizing on schema inconsistency and expectancy violation effects in social cognition and with research on the different facets of justice sensitivity in personality psychology.

Highlights

IntroductionNeither person can be sure that this is the case; this makes the described exchange fundamentally uncertain
Our present results suggest that being high in victim sensitivity is not associated with better source memory for untrustworthy behavior in general; rather, the results are more in line with the idea that victim-sensitive individuals rely on their negative schemata when guessing, and remember information that violates their negative expectations
Our results can be summarized as follows: victim-sensitive individuals show asymmetric expectancy violation effects which is evidenced in an asymmetric memory advantage for schemainconsistent information as well as an asymmetric change in person perception

Summary

Introduction

Neither person can be sure that this is the case; this makes the described exchange fundamentally uncertain This is the paradox of trust (Yamagishi, 2001): the more uncertain a situation, the more trust is required, but—at the same time—the more difficult it is to decide whether one’s interaction partner is trustworthy. Whenever a specific social situation entails cues suggesting that one’s interaction partner is not trustworthy, trust becomes riskier and, less likely It is highly functional (in particular for people aversive to exploitation) to attend to cues that are informative about another person’s untrustworthiness, and research shows that people do use these cues before they make a trustworthiness decision

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