Market hinders interpersonal trust: The exposure to market relationships makes people trust less through elevated proportional thinking and reduced state empathy.

In a series of five experiments, we provided evidence that evoking the market mindset negatively affects trust. We found that the market mindset reduces trust compared with the communal mindset (Experiment 1) and a neutral condition (Experiment 2). Next, we examined the psychological mechanisms behind the detrimental effect of the market mindset on trust and found that this effect was mediated by enhanced proportional thinking (Experiments 3 and 4) and reduced state empathy (Experiments 4 and 5). Finally, in a preregistered Experiment 5, we showed that these two psychological mechanisms are relatively independent.