General trust and judgments of trustworthiness

Contrary to the common sense idea that trustful people are gullible and eas ily believe whatever other people may say, past research reviewed by Rotter (1980a) indicated the idea was not necessarily valid. Two experiments of t his paper further demonstrated that trustful people are more sensitive to i nformation that indicates lack of trustworthiness in other people. In the e xperiments, subjects read a series of stories in which a person was about t o make a choice between a trustworthy action and an untrustworthy one. Some of them were also given pieces of information regarding trustworthiness of the person. They were then asked to predict the likelihood of the person t aking a trustworthy action. When no information was given, high trusters pr edicted with higher probability than low trusters that the person would tak e a trustworthy action. On the other hand, the high trusters lowered the pr edicted likelihood more steeply than the low when negative information was provided.