[acb-hsp] Building Trust Through Subliminal Cues

[peter altschul]

Building Trust through Subliminal Cues
  Direct contact with someone may not be as important in judging 
trustworthiness as was previously believed.
  Title: What's in a Name? Subliminally Activating Trusting 
Behavior
  Authors: Li Huang and J.  Keith Murnighan (Northwestern 
University) Publisher: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision 
Processes, vol.  111, no.  1 Date Published: January 2011
  What made people trust Bernard Madoff? In the largest Ponzi 
scheme on record, thousands of investors in Madoff's funds lost 
billions of dollars.  The fact that many of Madoff's friends and 
family members were among the investors may have helped him build 
trust with strangers, according to this paper, which finds that 
people can be won over by the names of someone's associates and 
the company he or she keeps.
  This study's conclusions break with previous research on trust, 
which has identified the importance of incremental, evaluative 
processes -- from snap judgments to relying on stereotypes to 
careful scrutiny -- in forming initial impressions of someone.  
This paper finds that trust development can begin even before 
people meet or learn about one another's professional reputation 
or social status.  Indeed, people can start trusting someone 
before they even realize it.  To some degree, at least, the 
placing of trust is not the result of a deliberate assessment, 
the researchers say, but of subconscious cues.
  In a series of three experiments involving more than 250 
students, the researchers created a scenario similar to 
investment schemes -- with the potential to either turn a profit 
or lose everything.  The participants were first asked to list 
people they trusted or didn't trust and the reasons for their 
feelings.  The researchers then primed the participants by 
flashing in their peripheral vision the names of those trusted or 
untrusted associates, targeting an area of the brain that has 
been shown to process content without conscious awareness.
  The students were then given USDD5.  They could send any 
portion of it, or none of it, to a stranger.  They were told 
their "receiver" would get triple the amount they actually sent 
and would then decide how much of this profit to return.  As with 
an investment scheme, the act of contributing money was risky but 
had the potential for shared gain.  By measuring how much 
participants decided to invest after being primed either 
positively or negatively, the researchers found that people 
tended to send more money when influenced by the names of people 
they trusted.  When asked to differentiate between people they 
liked and people they trusted, participants sent more money when 
primed by the names of those they trusted, suggesting that 
getting something back in return was an important factor in the 
trust-investment relationship.
  In Madoff's case, victims may have subconsciously come to trust 
him because the names of his other investors -- whether friends 
and family members or celebrities -- encouraged them to believe 
in him as well.  This conclusion is a warning to consumers and 
executives, who often search for recognizable names on client 
lists or professional associations when evaluating a potential 
partner in investment, real estate, or business.
  The researchers also point out that the changing nature of 
business, with increasingly fast-moving communications and 
travel, means that executives often have to build trust quickly 
among new co-workers and ever-forming teams.  Given the 
importance of trust to organizational performance, the authors 
advise companies to employ visual cues -- for example, 
project-related artwork or group photos -- that might prompt 
thoughts of successful past relationships.  Company events that 
bring potential partners together are also particularly useful, 
the paper concludes, because they form the basis of future name 
recognition and trust development.
  Bottom Line: Deciding whether to trust someone, especially with 
your money, all too often is a matter not of slow, deliberate 
evaluation but of subconscious impulse.  Name recognition plays a 
vital role; people can form impressions of others before they 
even meet, based on the new person's associates and the company 
he or she keeps.