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Engstrom, Holly Rose

University of British Columbia

Trust is vital for success in all kinds of social interactions. But how do people decide whether an individual can be trusted? The social class of the individual in question may be one important cue to trusting that they will behave in a moral and competent manner. We propose three mechanisms through which a person’s social class may influence how much we trust their morality and competence: Explicit dispositional stereotypes, explicit beliefs about situations, and implicit associations. We investigated this in two ways, with two opposing sets of findings. In Chapter Two, participants who played an economic game involving trust in morality trusted lower-class game partners more than higher-class partners. This was partially explained by people’s explicit stereotypes of lower-class people as more dispositionally moral than higher-class people. They also believed lower-class partners would be more tempted by their financial situation to betray them, but this did not predict trust. In Chapter Three, however, participants made repeated choices as to who they would trust in hypothetical scenarios involving trust in morality and in competence. Here, participants tended to trust higher-class partners in both morality and competence scenarios. We ran six additional studies testing potential explanations for the difference in results between Chapter Two and Three, finding some hints but no conclusive evidence. Finally, we considered whether implicit stereotypes might help to explain this difference. Across seven studies we developed a novel task to measure implicit associations with social class. Despite often reporting explicit stereotypes of lower- (vs. higher-) class people having more moral dispositions, people implicitly associated low social class with low morality. Both implicit and explicit morality stereotypes predicted decisions in the morality trust scenarios. We discuss additional possible resolutions to the discrepancy in results, as well as implications of our findings for understanding trust, social class stereotypes, and inequality.

Text

2023-10-05

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/86083

Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/