Effects of minimal social cues on trust in the investment game

In anonymous game tasks, individuals’ prosocial behaviour was shown to increase when those individuals were provided with social cues from a third party or bystander. It has been suggested that those social cues can be presented using a configuration suggestive of a face with ‘watching eyes’. This led us to question whether it was possible to provide the watching‐eyes configuration with even weaker facial information, such as a simple dot pattern. By using a minimal social cue paradigm, such as the one described above, the present research found that individuals’ trust toward the trustee increased when they detected the watching‐eyes dot pattern as a source of social cues in two settings: a hypothetical investment game for both college students (Study 1) and customs officers (Study 2); and an actual investment game for college students (Study 3).

Source: Asian Journal Of Social Psychology - June 28, 2016 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Ziqiang Xin, Youhui Liu, Zhixu Yang, Hongchuan Zhang Tags: Regular Article Source Type: research