The Impact Of Social Information On Interpersonal Initial Trust

As an important area in social psychology, social comparison has been widely researched science its theory was advanced half a century ago, though we now know a lot about this phenomenon on individual level, but few researches focuses on social comparison's influences on interpersonal level as well as intergroup level. To fill this theoretical void, this study will choose initial trust as the interpersonal variable and work on the social comparison's influences on interpersonal initial trust through a lab experiment. We choose initial trust as the interpersonal variable because we could infer its close relationship with social comparison after a good well of literature review and we realize the crying need from both theory and practice. In this research, we exam the three types of social comparison information (upward, downward, equal)'s effect on interpersonal initial trust. Still we have studied the intergroup variable (relative ranking)'s influence on the just mentioned effect.The experiment is processed in groups, which was randomly formed by three strangers. The subjects are firstly asked to finish a finding fault task independently, and then they will get feedbacks. Every subject will get the same feedback about himself/herself, but there were different types of result information about their group members. Through the different information we manipulate the social comparison information received by subjects. Then, we employ the classic trust game to measure subjects' initial trust toward other members in their group.The study proved the hypothesis as follows:(1)other's results (higher or lower than the subject) have a significant influence on subject's initial trust toward him/her;(2)upward comparison information has significantly positive influence on subjects' initial trust;(3)subject's intergroup relative ranking has significant influence on his/her initial trust;(4)although subject get the same type of social comparison information(upward), he/she will have significantly higher initial trust if he/she have a lower relative ranking in the group.At the end of this research, limitations of this study are noted, for example, being inadequate in exploring the specific mechanism between social comparison and trust and imperfection of the experiment design. Finally, we proposed that future studies should pay more attention to the social comparison's outcome variables on interpersonal level, clarify the psychological mechanism between social comparison and trust, and stress the application of laboratory and ecological methods.