People ‘Trust’ Strangers Out of Respect, Moral Obligation, Not Perceived Trustworthiness

Why do we trust strangers? Perhaps we don’t in
any meaningful way. A new psychology
study suggests that placing trust in strangers may be more
a function of feeling morally or socially obligated to do so than
genuinely believing them to be trustworthy. We “trust” so as not to
disrespect someone’s character, the researchers say. 

“Trust is … vital between strangers within social groups who
have no responsibility toward each other outside of a single,
transitory interaction,” said lead study author and Cornell
University professor David Dunning, citing eBay and farmer’s
markets as examples.

“We wanted to examine why people, even those with low
expectations of others, tend to trust total strangers more often
than not.”

The researchers recruited a total 645 students—about half from
Cornell and half from Germany’s Cologne University—for a series of
trust experiments. The results,
published in the American Psychological Association’s Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, suggest trust between
strangers is less rational judgement call and more norms meet
neuroticism.

“Trusting others is what people think they should do, and
emotions such as anxiety or guilt associated with not
fulfilling a social duty or responsibility may account for much of
the excessive trust observed between strangers every day,” said
Dunning. 

In one trust game (a variation on one from behavioral economics
studies), participants were given $5 and two options: keep the $5
or give it to an anonymous stranger. If they chose to give, the sum
would be increased to $20 and the recipient could keep the whole
$20 or give $10 back to the first person for being a good sport.
Participants were also asked to rate how choosing to give versus
keep the $5 would make them feel and whether they thought they
should do so.

A clear majority (71 percent) decided to give the $5 to the
stranger—a number far greater than would be expected based on
students’ expectations of peers returning the money, researchers
note. Not surprisingly, those who felt they should trust
the stranger to kick back some cash were more likely give them the
$5, even if they didn’t necessarily want to do
so.

In another experiment, participants faced a similar setup, but
this time the recipient of $5 would flip a coin to determine
whether some of the money was kicked back. When the outcome was
based on chance rather than trust, only about 44 percent gave the
$5 away.

In the first experiment, “participants wished to avoid showing
disrespect for the moral character of their interaction partner,”
the researchers concluded. “When we removed the issue of the
partner’s character by making the partner’s response depend on a
coin flip rather than on an intentional choice, participants were
much less willing to make themselves vulnerable to the other
person.”