Building Trust through Subliminal Cues

Direct contact with someone may not be as important in judging trustworthiness as was previously believed.

Title: What’s in a Name? Subliminally Activating Trusting Behavior (Subscription or fee required.)
Authors: Li Huang and J. Keith Murnighan (Northwestern University)
Publisher: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, vol. 111,no. 1.
Date Published: January 2011

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What made people trust Bernard Madoff? In the largest Ponzi scheme on record, thousands of investors in Madoff’s funds lost billions of dollars. The fact that many of Madoff’s friends and family members were among the investors may have helped him build trust with strangers, according to this paper, which finds that people can be won over by the names of someone’s associates and the company he or she keeps.

This study’s conclusions break with previous research on trust, which has identified the importance of incremental, evaluative processes — from snap judgments to relying on stereotypes to careful scrutiny — in forming initial impressions of someone. This paper finds that trust development can begin even before people meet or learn about one another’s professional reputation or social status. Indeed, people can start trusting someone before they even realize it.

To some degree, at least, the placing of trust is not the result of a deliberate assessment, the researchers say, but of subconscious cues.

In a series of three experiments involving more than 250 students, the researchers created a scenario similar to investment schemes — with the potential to either turn a profit or lose everything. The participants were first asked to list people they trusted or didn’t trust and the reasons for their feelings. The researchers then primed the participants by flashing in their peripheral vision the names of those trusted or untrusted associates, targeting an area of the brain that has been shown to process content without conscious awareness.
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