Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Influence Of Similarity And Social Reciprocity On Decisions To Trust, Alexa Rempel

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Trust decisions made in the social world have important consequences for decision makers, such as financial and/or social losses. Given the importance of these decisions, psychologists often ask what variables lead to trust. The most commonly studied predictor variable is the degree of similarity between participants and their interaction partners. Here we ask how a more visible cue, social reciprocity, affects trust decisions in concert with similarity. We use a “chat-room” style task to independently manipulate the degree to which participants are similar to a set of avatars that they believe are other players and the degree to which those …