Institute for Psychological Research and Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University Leiden, Netherlands.
Front Psychol. 2014 Jun 6;5:561. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00561. eCollection 2014.
Interpersonal trust is an essential ingredient of many social relationships but how stable is it actually, and how is it controlled? There is evidence that the degree of trust into others might be rather volatile and can be affected by manipulations like drawing attention to personal interdependence or independence. Here we investigated whether the degree of interpersonal trust can be biased by inducing either a more integrative or a more focused/exclusive cognitive control mode by means of a creativity task requiring divergent or convergent thinking, respectively. Participants then performed the trust game, which provides an index of interpersonal trust by assessing the money units one participant (the trustor) transfers to another (the trustee). As expected, trustors transferred significantly more money to trustees after engaging in divergent thinking as compared to convergent thinking. This observation provides support for the idea that interpersonal trust is controlled by domain-general (i.e., not socially dedicated) cognitive states.
人际信任是许多社会关系的重要组成部分，但它实际上有多稳定，又是如何被控制的呢？有证据表明，对他人的信任程度可能相当不稳定，并且可能会受到一些操纵的影响，比如引起对个人相互依存或独立性的关注。在这里，我们通过一项需要发散思维或聚合思维的创造力任务，分别诱导更具综合性或更具专注性/排他性的认知控制模式，来研究人际信任的程度是否会受到影响。然后，参与者进行信任游戏，通过评估一名参与者（委托人）向另一名参与者（受托人）转移的货币单位来评估人际信任度。正如预期的那样，与聚合思维相比，在进行发散思维后，委托人向受托人转移的钱明显更多。这一观察结果为人际信任受非特定领域（即非专门用于社交）的认知状态控制的观点提供了支持。
