Journal of Economic Psychology xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Journal of Economic Psychology
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/joep
How activating cognitive content shapes trust: A subliminal
priming study q
Ann-Christin Posten a,⇑, Axel Ockenfels b, Thomas Mussweiler a
a
b
Department of Psychology, University of Cologne, Richard-Strauss-Str. 2, D-50931 Cologne, Germany
Department of Economics, University of Cologne, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, D-50923 Cologne, Germany
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Available online xxxx
JEL classification:
D01
D03
PsycINFO classification:
3040
Keywords:
Trust
Distrust
Priming
Belief formation
a b s t r a c t
The activation of cognitive contents plays a prominent role in social psychological research.
Yet, so far this has received little attention in economics. In our research we connect a standard social psychological manipulation to activate cognitive content (a trust vs. distrust
priming manipulation) to a classic paradigm from economics (a trust game). Our findings
demonstrate that subliminally activating the concept of trust (vs. distrust) leads participants to judge a series of strangers as more (vs. less) trustworthy. Moreover, our research
shows for the first time that such a subliminal priming manipulation shapes the subsequent sending behavior in a fictitious version of a standard economic trust game. This suggests that psychological priming techniques allow new insights into what determines
beliefs in economic games.
Ó 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Trust is a crucial ingredient in virtually all economic and social relationships. Every day we choose to trust doctors, teachers, employers, colleagues, airlines, neighbors, traders, and others. Trust equally affects the effectiveness of large markets and
entire economies (Bolton, Greiner, & Ockenfels, in press), as well as every person’s microcosm of friendships (Crocker &
Canevello, 2008), committed relationships (Koranyi & Rothermund, 2012), and family ties (Conley, Moors, Ziegler, & Feltner,
2011). As a result, for decades trust has been in the focus of research in economics (e.g. Arrow, 1974; Greiner & Ockenfels,
2009) and psychology (e.g. Schul, Mayo, & Burnstein, 2004; Todorov, Baron, & Oosterhof, 2008), as well as in neighboring
disciplines such as evolutionary theory (Yamagishi, Cook, & Watabe, 1998), neurobiology (Kosfeld, Heinrichs, Zak, Fischbacher, & Fehr, 2005), sociology (Coleman, 1990), and philosophy (Lahno, 2002). However, the paradigms used to capture trust,
and the corresponding perspectives on trust, typically differ markedly across the disciplines.
In economics, researchers tend to focus on the role of preferences and beliefs for trust. One’s preferences determine which
outcome one favors. Preferences are typically assumed to be exogenous to the context (i.e. consistent over different contexts), stable over time, and to only depend on outcomes. Classic game-theory, for example, assumes that people always preq
This research was supported by the German Science Foundation (DFG) through support of the Research Unit ‘‘Design and Behavior: Economic
Engineering of Firms and Markets’’ (FOR 1271), a Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz award to Axel Ockenfels, and a Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz award to Thomas
Mussweiler.
⇑ Corresponding author. Address: Department of Psychology, University of Cologne, Richard-Strauss-Str. 2, D-50931 Cologne, Germany. Tel.: +49 (0)221
470 4924; fax: +49 (0)221 470 1216.
E-mail address: [email protected] (A.-C. Posten).
0167-4870/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2013.04.002
Please cite this article in press as: Posten, A.-C., et al. How activating cognitive content shapes trust: A subliminal priming study. Journal of
Economic Psychology (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2013.04.002
2
A.-C. Posten et al. / Journal of Economic Psychology xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
fer having more money to having less money. Yet, apart from the material gain, other factors have been found to determine
one’s preferences. The relation of one’s own outcome to the outcome of others (Bolton & Ockenfels, 2000), if an interaction
partner is an ingroup- or outgroup-member (Chen & Li, 2009), or one’s inherited dispositions (Cesarini et al., 2008) may significantly influence which outcomes individuals prefer. Furthermore, this literature also assumes that preferences how people evaluate, for example, their relative position in a group or the welfare of in-group vs. out-group matches are exogenous
and stable. In line with this assumption, preferences are usually represented by fixed utility functions in economic models
(cf. Loewenstein, Rick, & Cohen, 2008). In addition to one’s preferences, one’s beliefs about how others will behave in a given
situation influence how we behave ourselves. Whether we do or do not believe that an interaction partner will cooperate, for
instance, affects our own willingness to cooperate. Beliefs are assumed to be formed according to equilibrium conditions (i.e.
decisions are mutually best responses given one’s preferences, and beliefs about decisions accurately reflect actual decisions), and are subject to rational updating if possible and necessary.
For trusting behavior the interplay of preferences and beliefs becomes obvious in simple economic trust games (Berg,
Dickhaut, & McCabe, 1995). In standard two-person trust games, a truster owns an initial endowment, which he or she
can either keep or transfer to another person – the trustee. The investment of the truster is typically multiplied by a certain
rate (e.g. 2), so that the trustee receives more than the truster has initially sent (e.g., 2 Euro for every Euro sent by the truster). In a second step, the trustee decides how much he or she is willing to return to the truster, which might also be multiplied by a rate larger than 1. According to game theoretical reasoning, people’s preferences in such a game are fixed: Apart
from the core preference to maximize one’s personal gain, other overarching preferences such as individual levels of risk
aversion (Karlan, 2005), altruism (Ashraf, Bohnet, & Piankov, 2006; Cox, 2004), and betrayal aversion (Bohnet, Greig, Herrmann, & Zeckhauser, 2008; Bolton & Ockenfels, 2010) influence how much a truster is willing to send: For instance, the less
risk averse and the more altruistic a given truster, the more he or she is willing to send. In addition to preferences, beliefs
about the trustworthiness of one’s counterpart also shape individual behavior in a trust game. Clearly, trusters are likely to
send more money, if they see their counterpart as trustworthy (Ashraf et al., 2006; Bolton, Loebbecke, & Ockenfels, 2008;
Bolton & Ockenfels, 2009; Greiner, Ockenfels, & Werner, 2012) – which in turn may depend on the underlying institutions
(Bohnet, Frey, & Huck, 2006; Bolton et al., 2008).
Economic theories provide a clear prediction for rational decision making of selfish players in those games: If the trust
game is played once and two players participate and remain anonymous, nothing should be sent by the truster and nothing
should be returned by the trustee (Berg et al., 1995). This reasoning is derived by backwards induction: If more money is
better than less, the truster should not return anything. Thus, the truster should not send anything to the trustee in the first
move because nothing is expected in return. Not to trust and not to reciprocate is thus the only Nash-equilibrium among
selfish and rational players.
Social psychological research, on the other hand, offers a different viewpoint. Investigating a large variety of phenomena,
various researchers have concluded that how humans think, feel, and act is shaped by more than one rather ‘‘rational’’ way of
integrating information. Rather, dual-process theories have assumed a prominent role in explaining human judgment, decision making, and behavior. In addition to a ‘‘rational’’ (Epstein, 1991), ‘‘deliberative’’ (Fazio, 1986), ‘‘systematic’’ (Chaiken,
Liberman, & Eagly, 1989; Petty, Cacioppo, & Berkowitz, 1986), ‘‘rule-based’’ (Sloman, 1996), and ‘‘effortful’’ (Devine, 1989)
way of information processing, these theories propose a second way. This second route operates in a more ‘‘heuristic’’ (Chaiken et al., 1989; Petty et al., 1986), ‘‘associative’’ (Sloman, 1996), ‘‘experiential’’ (Epstein, 1991), and ‘‘automatic’’ (Devine,
1989; Fazio, 1986) fashion (for an overview of dual-process models see Evans, 2008; Smith & DeCoster, 2000). From this angle, it is not as clear that the rather ‘‘rational’’ thinking style is superior. In the domain of social psychology it is broadly
acknowledged that heuristic processing often constitutes a valuable tool to reach fast and resource-saving decisions without
necessarily being accompanied by trade-offs in accuracy (e.g. Corcoran & Mussweiler, 2010; Gigerenzer & Gaissmaier, 2011;
Mussweiler & Epstude, 2009; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974).
Recently, an integrative framework for these two principle ways of information processing has been proposed (Strack &
Deutsch, 2004, 2005). More specifically, this approach assumes two systems (a reflective and an impulsive system) to operate simultaneously and to influence each other throughout the formation of social behavior. The reflective system requires
substantial cognitive resources and integrates and weighs information about outcome-values and their respective probabilities to reach the best decision. This is somehow reminiscent of the way economic theory assumes humans to reach decisions. In the Reflective- Impulsive Model (RIM; Strack & Deutsch, 2004), all judgments and decisions are assumed to
involve the reflective system. This is partially inherent to the nature of judgments and decisions, namely their explicitness
and their propositional structure. When judgments and decisions are formed, the reflective system has taken part in their
generation by relating critical contents to one another in a propositional manner and by assigning a truth value to these
relations (Strack & Deutsch, 2004). For example, the judgment that someone is a trustworthy person includes the relation
of the person to the category of trustworthy people. Furthermore, decisions – such as decisions to trust another person –
are strongly influenced by reflective weighing and integrating outcome-affecting information. In fact, economic research
has often demonstrated the reflective component of trust decisions: Variations in game structure and outcome-expectancies
critically shape trusting behavior in economic trust games (Snijders & Keren, 2001). The impulsive system, on the other hand,
requires little cognitive resources. It is fast and relies on the principle of spreading activation within the structures of
associative networks. The reflective system and the impulsive system are interactive. Thus, information processed in the
one system can affect processing in the other system. For example, whenever one deliberatively encounters a decision in
the reflective system, corresponding contents in the impulsive system will be activated and used to reach the decision. Vice
Please cite this article in press as: Posten, A.-C., et al. How activating cognitive content shapes trust: A subliminal priming study. Journal of
Economic Psychology (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2013.04.002
A.-C. Posten et al. / Journal of Economic Psychology xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
3
versa, whenever information has been activated in the associative structures of the impulsive system, its accessibility will be
heightened. As a result, it will be more likely encountered in reflective decision making (Strack & Deutsch, 2004).
This may have unexpected effects on reflective reasoning. Specifically, information that is rendered accessible in the impulsive system for reasons that are unrelated to the judgment task at hand may still influence reflective processing of this judgment. In fact, this possibility is supported by a rich body of classic social cognition findings demonstrating that whenever
people make judgments and decisions, they base them on the information that is accessible at this particular moment in time.
The higher the accessibility of applicable information is, the more likely it will have an effect on the judgment or decision at
hand. A fascinating fact is that the activated information does not necessarily have to be inherently linked to the judgment
to have an impact. Once activated in one context, the influence of accessible cognitive contents can carry over to subsequent
contexts and exert an influence on independent judgments and decisions. For example, the mere activation of certain mental
representations (such as the activation of certain trait concepts) influences subsequent person judgments – generally in the
direction of the activated concept (for a review see Higgins, 1996). In the beginnings of priming research in the social psychological domain, participants typically engaged in a priming task in which they consciously dealt with the priming stimuli (Higgins, Rholes, & Jones, 1977). In subsequent, ostensible unrelated tasks, these supraliminally primed concepts then exerted an
unobtrusive influence on judgments about an ambiguous target. The apparent disconnect between priming and judgmental
task is essential to exclude influences of demand characteristics, strategic reasoning, or correction processes on the critical
judgment. Notably, later research revealed that such effects of a primed trait concept on subsequent person judgments even
hold if participants are unaware of the priming stimuli because the primes are presented subliminally, below the threshold
for conscious perception. This reduces possible effects that derive from participant’s reasoning about possible influences from
a priming manipulation tremendously (Bargh & Pietromonaco, 1982; for a discussion see also Bargh & Chartrand, 2000). Taken
together, priming experiments demonstrate that judgment-irrelevant knowledge that is rendered accessible in a preceding
priming task critically shapes how we see, interpret and judge others’ behaviors in the reflective system.
In the case of trust (and distrust) the principle of dual processes should also hold. As every other judgment and decision,
judgments about another person’s trustworthiness should occur in the reflective system, which may be influenced by the in
parallel operating impulsive system (Strack & Deutsch, 2004). In fact, this assumption is supported by a recent body of literature. For example, reflective judgments about a person’s trustworthiness may be already influenced by minimal physical
changes in a person’s face (Todorov et al., 2008). Also being exposed to trust- vs. suspicion- evoking information in one context may influence how one processes information in another, unrelated context (e.g. Mayer & Mussweiler, 2011; Schul,
Mayo, & Burnstein, 2008; Schul et al., 2004). Thus, according to social psychological theorizing and research, reflective trust
judgments and trust decisions should clearly be influenced by contents that have been activated in a previous, unrelated task
and still exert their influence in the associative structures of the impulsive system.
In this context, it is important to note that a dual-system approach is a very different perspective than the one-system
preferences-beliefs-approach utilized in economics. While in economics preferences are assumed to be outcome-based
and stable across contexts, and beliefs are assumed to be determined by equilibrium conditions or at least to systematically
incorporate only relevant information, social psychology also focuses on the different processes by which preferences and beliefs are constructed. Recently, economic research has also started to focus on dual system approaches and how they may be
relevant for economic behavior (e.g. Kay & Ross, 2003; Kay, Wheeler, Bargh, & Ross, 2004; Liberman, Samuels, & Ross, 2004).
A recent neuroeconomic review painted a mixed picture on the role of dual-process theories in economics. For instance, the
role of dual process accounts on social preferences – though empirical evidence overall seems supportive – still suffers of
conflicting results in the most prominent studies (Loewenstein et al., 2008). Trust games constitute one example of a paradigm with such mixed results. One study, for example, demonstrated that labeling the counterpart ‘‘partner’’ vs. ‘‘opponent’’
did not influence initial trust in repeated trust games, but influenced trust decisions in subsequent rounds through higher
levels of reciprocity demonstrated by the counterparts (Burnham, McCabe, & Smith, 2000).
Having dual-process theories in mind, one may have derived a different prediction. Specifically, one would have expected
initial trust to also vary as a function of the counterpart’s label. A closer look at priming research offers an explanation for
this finding: One fascinating fact about priming is that as soon as it is noticed, participants may correct (or even overcorrect)
for their influence (Bargh & Chartrand, 2000; Strack, Schwarz, Bless, Kübler, & Wänke, 1993). Labeling a counterpart ‘‘partner’’ or ‘‘opponent’’ in the context of the game itself clearly may have resulted in such correction strategies. Subliminal priming techniques constitute a tool to circumvent problems that may arise from being aware of the prime. By exerting their
effect underneath the threshold of conscious awareness, these priming strategies can exert their effect without the involvement of active strategies used by the participants (Bargh & Chartrand, 2000). Thus, those priming techniques should be able
to demonstrate the influence of the impulsive system on ‘‘rational’’ economic trust decisions.
In a nutshell, on the one hand economic reasoning holds that beliefs about another person’s trustworthiness are formed via
one rational process that encounters only relevant information. On the other hand, social psychological reasoning suggests two
systems to be accountable for belief formation: Apart from a ‘‘rational’’ system, the impulsive system also influences one’s trust
judgments and decisions. If judgments and decisions were solely reflective and no influence of the impulsive system existed,
then activation of different contents in the associative structures of the impulsive system should not exert any effect. Our research aims to put these different assumptions about trust belief formation to a test. To do so, we specifically activate different
contents in the impulsive system to demonstrate its influence on reflective reasoning in the domain of ‘‘rational’’ trust decisions in an economic trust game. By using a subliminal priming procedure to influence trust beliefs, we specifically use a priming technique that operates underneath the threshold of conscious awareness and thus avoids strategic reasoning and possible
Please cite this article in press as: Posten, A.-C., et al. How activating cognitive content shapes trust: A subliminal priming study. Journal of
Economic Psychology (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2013.04.002
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A.-C. Posten et al. / Journal of Economic Psychology xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
correction strategies. To our knowledge, we are the first to prime the mere concept of trust and examine its effect in subsequent
trust judgments and decisions in an unrelated economic trust game. The present research sets out to demonstrate that the mere
activation of information in the impulsive system may influence even reflective decisions in trust games.
2. The current research
To do so, we integrated standard paradigms from social psychological and behavioral economics research. We activated
the concepts of trust – and its counterpart distrust – by using a subtle, subliminal priming procedure (Bargh & Pietromonaco,
1982). Trust and distrust have been suggested to represent two ends of a bipolar continuum (Schul et al., 2008; UllmannMargalit, 2004). In line with the idea of a continuum, we decided to activate cognitive content from both opposing ends,
respectively. Even though this does not allow for conclusions regarding the default state of mind, more importantly to
our hypothesis, it provided us with the possibility to investigate clearly opposing influences on trust behavior. As our dependent measures we used two tasks: To assess the influence of the activated contents on the specific beliefs one holds about
other people’s trustworthiness, we asked our participants to judge the trustworthiness of a series of strangers. To examine
whether the activation of those contents affects economic trust decisions, we used a fictitious version of a classic economic
trust game – a game that holds an economic clear rational regarding the participants’ decision strategies (Berg et al., 1995).
Specifically, we closely modeled the situation of trusting a stranger by using a two-person one shot trust game, in which no
further information about the counterpart was provided.
2.1. Method
2.1.1. Participants and design
Thirty-eight participants (20 female; age 18–29) were recruited at the campus of the University of Cologne. They were
offered a chocolate bar or a coffee voucher as compensation for participation in a psychological study. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the two priming conditions (trust vs. distrust).
2.1.2. Materials and procedure
Upon arrival in the lab, participants were seated in individual cubicles in front of personal computers equipped with
60 Hertz monitors. No more than three individuals participated in one session. After completion of the consent form they
were asked to work on three separate tasks.
2.1.2.1. Priming trust. The first task was our subliminal trust vs. distrust priming procedure (Mayer & Mussweiler, 2011) that
was embedded in a lexical decision task (Dijksterhuis, Aarts, Bargh, & Van Knippenberg, 2000; Mussweiler & Förster, 2000).
Particularly, participants were asked to distinguish – as fast as possible – whether presented letter strings constituted words
of the German language or not. To indicate their decision, participants were instructed to press one of two critical buttons on
a response box: a blue button on the left end indicated a ‘‘word’’-decision; a yellow button on the right end indicated a ‘‘nonword’’ -decision. As soon as the participants started the task by pressing one of the two critical buttons, they engaged in 26
lexical decision trials. To embed the priming stimuli in the lexical decision task, each trial was set up the following way: a
fixation string (XX}Ð$XX?ß%XX) appeared in the center of the screen. After 3000 ms it ‘‘flashed’’ and during this interruption
the critical prime word was presented for 16 ms. It was either the German word ‘‘vertrauen’’ [trust] or ‘‘misstrauen’’ [distrust]. The prime word was masked by a 500 ms post-mask-string that was identical to the previously presented fixation
string (XX}Ð$XX?ß%XX). Subsequently, the target letter string appeared until the participants indicated their lexical decision. Nineteen of the lexical decisions constituted meaningful German words, none of which were in any way related to trust.
Participants were exposed to the prime word in 24 experimental trials. The first two trials constituted practice trials without
presentation of the prime stimuli.
2.1.2.2. Trustworthiness judgments. The second task assessed the level of trustworthiness our participants ascribed to strangers. Screen by screen, 20 photographs, portraying 10 female and 10 male targets with neutral facial expressions (all photographical material was taken from Minear & Park, 2004), were presented to them. Randomly, the presentation started either
with a photograph of a female vs. a male target person. The participant’s task was to judge each target’s trustworthiness on a
9-point Likert-type scale (1 = not at all trustworthy; 9 = very trustworthy).
2.1.2.3. Trust game. Subsequently, participants engaged in a fictitious two-person one shot trust game. This part of the experiment was a paper-and-pencil task. All participants imagined to be in the role of the truster. They were asked to envision a
scenario, in which they were able to transfer amounts of money to a randomly assigned other participant. They and their
opponent would each receive an initial endowment of 6 Euros. They could assign any amount of their initial endowment
(in units of one Euro) to their opponent. Any transferred Euro would be doubled. Their opponent – the trustee – would specify for each possible amount sent by the truster how many Euros of his initial endowment he would be willing to return.
Again, any amount sent would be doubled.
Please cite this article in press as: Posten, A.-C., et al. How activating cognitive content shapes trust: A subliminal priming study. Journal of
Economic Psychology (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2013.04.002
A.-C. Posten et al. / Journal of Economic Psychology xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
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2.1.2.4. Awareness check. After making a decision in the trust game, participants were asked for their demographic data, and
completed a funneled debriefing procedure. Specifically, we asked, in what way they believed the three tasks had influenced
one another. Then we provided them with the information that a word was presented to them during the lexical decision
task. In case they had identified the word, they were asked to report it. Finally, they were provided with a list of 10 words
that contained the two critical prime words. In a forced-choice question they were asked to guess which word of the list had
been presented to them. After choosing one of the words, participants were thanked and handed their compensation. An
analysis of the participant’s answers in the funneled debriefing procedure revealed, that none of the participants showed
awareness of the purpose of the study and assumed the first task – the priming task – to be relevant for the subsequent
two tasks. Furthermore, none of the participants guessed the correct priming word and provided it in the open answer field.
We also analyzed whether participants’ guesses in the forced-choice question differed between the two priming conditions.
This was not the case (p = .71; Fisher’s Exact Test).
2.2. Results
2.2.1. Trustworthiness judgments
We expected participants who were subliminally primed with trust to judge the target persons to be more trustworthy
than participants who were subliminally primed with distrust. To investigate our hypothesis, we analyzed the mean trustworthiness ratings for the 20 target persons (Cronbach’s a = .88). As expected, participants primed with trust judged the targets to be more trustworthy (M = 5.66; SD = 0.73) than participants primed with distrust (M = 5.05; SD = 0.97), t(36) = 2.21,
p = .03, d = 0.74.
2.2.2. Trust game
Furthermore, we investigated whether trust-primed and distrust-primed participants differed in their sending behavior
in the fictitious trust game. We predicted participants to engage in more trusting behavior after the trust prime. Indeed, this
was the case. Participants in the trust condition sent higher amounts of money to the trustee (M = 4.37; SD = 1.77) than participants in the distrust condition (M = 3.21; SD = 1.36), t(33.73) = 2.26, p = .03, d = 0.75 (degrees of freedom were adjusted
for unequal variances, F(1, 36) = 5.52, p = .02; Levene’s Test).
3. Discussion
We connect a classic paradigm from economics (i.e. a trust game) with a standard social psychological manipulation (i.e. a
priming procedure). By doing so, we demonstrate that activating specific cognitive contents via priming has an impact on the
initial beliefs we form about the trustworthiness of others. In particular, after the concept of trust (vs. distrust) was subliminally activated, a series of strangers was judged to be more (vs. less) trustworthy. Moreover, we demonstrate for the first
time that this subtle priming of trust (vs. distrust) shaped subsequent trust-related behavior in a fictitious version of a standard economic trust game. Our findings demonstrate that a mechanism that has been identified as a critical determinant of
human behavior in social psychological research also plays out in classic behavioral economics paradigms.
In experimental economics, a central means to investigate interpersonal interactions is the use of well-defined economic
games, which in addition often allow for clear predictions if preferences are given and beliefs can be rationally determined.
With their finely adjustable parameters they also allow to control institutional variables that closely model central aspects of
interpersonal transactions. In principle, such economic games also offer compelling research possibilities to social psychology. In particular, they allow to cross-validate psychological notions with sharp-edged, established measures. The present
research, for example, tested the influence of a subtle trust priming procedure in a well-controlled paradigm of experimental
economics. This enabled us to confirm that our very subtle trust and distrust priming procedures affect decisions in the
respective economic paradigm that was specifically designed to measure trust (Camerer, 2003). Because economics offer various parameters to investigate different aspects of trust (e.g. repeated interactions), it seems compelling to also investigate
the influence of priming procedures in different trust paradigms.
In addition, our findings also hold interesting implications for economic theories on trust. Our research extends previous
economic trust research by demonstrating how deliberate trust judgments can be modified without a rational updating-process through the mere activation of cognitive concepts in the impulsive system. Economic research has acknowledged the
influence of contextual circumstances (e.g. Kay & Ross, 2003; Kay et al., 2004; Tversky & Kahneman, 1981). Yet, by focusing
on exogenous preferences and rational belief formation, economists generally lack the tools and models to investigate how
context affects the cognitive construction of preferences and beliefs. This gap of knowledge is implicit in a significant body of
economic work, and it is only sometimes made explicit. One example is a recent paper by Dufwenberg, Gächter, and HennigSchmidt (2011) who investigate social behavior in the laboratory and change the framing (context) of the games being
played. They conclude:
Framing effects can be understood as a two-part process where (i) frames move beliefs, and (ii) beliefs shape motivation
and choice. Guilt aversion and reciprocity theory furnish specific statements about (ii), for which we have found empirical
support. We have not proposed and tested any theory as regards (i), but our results contribute to understanding the subtle interplay between framing, beliefs and choices. A challenge for future work is to develop a theory of framing that can
explain also (i) (p. 472).
Please cite this article in press as: Posten, A.-C., et al. How activating cognitive content shapes trust: A subliminal priming study. Journal of
Economic Psychology (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2013.04.002
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A.-C. Posten et al. / Journal of Economic Psychology xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
The priming techniques developed in social psychology provide the tools to systematically and exogenously manipulate
context and information processing (see below) and thus to investigate the formation of beliefs and preferences in highly
controlled laboratory environments. The results of such behavioral economics studies, together with the corresponding theories developed in social psychology, can then feed into the development of new economic models, capturing what might be
called ‘‘economic cognition’’. Our research adds to this growing body of literature. To our knowledge, the present research is
the first to examine how the activation of the mere concept of trust outside of the critical decision-making context itself (i.e.
in a preceding priming task) proves influential in the realm of economic trust. Future studies should check robustness of our
findings in incentivized and repeated games.
On a more general level, our research suggests further avenues for future research in experimental economics. As the activation of cognitive contents in the impulsive system is of great importance for one’s judgments and decisions, so is the way
such activated contents are further processed and applied. Information processing strategies, such as different construal levels (for a review see Trope & Liberman, 2010), regulatory foci (Higgins, 1997), or comparative thinking styles (Mussweiler,
2003) have been found to shape the way we deal with activated information. For example comparative thinking styles influence how we perceive other people (Mussweiler & Damisch, 2008). Hence, it seems to be a promising perspective to take
such comparative thinking styles into account when examining how beliefs about others influence economic decision-making and behavior (cf. Crusius, Van Horen, & Mussweiler, 2012). Notably, just as cognitive contents can be activated by priming procedures, so can the way information is processed (e.g. Mussweiler, 2001; Mussweiler & Ockenfels, 2012 for a first
behavioral economics application). Hence, priming methods do not only allow investigating cognitive contents that influence
economic reasoning, but also put us in a position to investigate how different cognitive processing strategies influence economic behavior. As cognitive contents and cognitive processes have hardly been integrated into established economic theories, the present research also suggests new directions for future theoretical developments.
It appears plausible (and in particular our second task suggests so) that our subliminal priming mainly affected people’s
beliefs. Yet priming may also affect preferences. Strong evidence for this comes from the social psychological research on
goal priming effects. Recent research has demonstrated that priming techniques can also be used to activate specific goals
that then shape subsequent behavior (Chartrand & Bargh, 1996). To fulfill their activated goals, people typically behave in a
goal-consistent manner (e.g. Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai, Barndollar, & Trötschel, 2001; for an exception see Crusius & Mussweiler, 2012). Assuming that (social) preferences and goals are often closely associated (as might be the case for, say, fairness), this research may be taken to suggest that preferences may also be shaped by activating specific preference-related
cognitive contents. Clearly, however, this possibility still awaits empirical scrutiny.
The present research was designed to integrate social psychological and behavioral economics perspectives on trust.
Combining research methods that are well established in their respective disciplines, we suspect, may offer similarly novel
perspectives on many other core constituents of economic decision-making and behavior.
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