Doctoral Dissertation Research In DRMS: An egocetric model of trust among strangers

Brown University, Providence RI

Investigators

Abstract

This work adopts an interdisciplinary approach to examine trust, a topic with far reaching consequences. Knowing when to trust others is an essential skill, but little is known about the mental processes that lead to trust. This research introduces a model to explain the decision making process underlying trust. There are two critical factors a person considers when deciding to trust: the potential outcomes (the costs and benefits of trusting) and the perspective of the trusted party (how these people are likely to act if I trust them). The central assumption of the model is that decision making is primarily egocentric: people focus on the potential outcomes while perspective-taking plays a limited or secondary role. Two experiments examine both trusting behavior and the process of decision making. Participants will play a series of economic trust games. The relevant information in these games will be initially concealed and participants will need to actively search in order to learn the consequences of their decisions. The researchers record and analyze the order and duration in which people search for different types of information. The first experiment will test if the decision making process is egocentric; the second experiment will attempt to reduce this egocentrism using a perspective-taking manipulation.