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Running head: PRIMING TRUST ON IMPRESSIONS
Priming Trust on Impressions
Holly Brun and Cecelia Fyfe
Hanover College
PSY 344: Social Psychology
Winter 2013
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PRIMING TRUST ON IMPRESSIONS
Abstract
This study examined the influence of priming on impression formation. Participants
eighteen to twenty- two were recruited from an online survey website. A sentence unscrambling
task was used to either prime participants for the trait trustworthiness or untrustworthiness. Then
participants read a short ambiguous description of a stranger and rated their impression of said
stranger. Results indicated that there was no difference between the primed groups. Implications
for future research on priming and impressions will be discussed.
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Impression Formation
People may make first impressions of strangers when they first meet (Ambady &
Rosenthal, 1992). Research suggests that these quick first impressions may be influenced by the
person’s recent past (Weisbuch & Unkelbach, 2008). Priming is a possible way to influence how
first impressions are made. Bargh and colleagues, (1996) defined priming as “the incidental
activation of knowledge structures, such as trait concepts and stereotypes, by the current
situational context.” This experiment is interested in the effects of priming on impression
formation. Specifically, we want to examine whether priming subjects with the trait trust will
affect the judgments a subject makes about a description of a stranger.
Category Accessibility and Judgment
Srull and Wyer (1979) examined the effects of category accessibility on judgments about
people. Their subjects were either primed with a hostility condition or a kindness condition. The
subjects were primed by a sentence unscrambling task that either had a hostile connotation or a
kind connotation. After the priming, subjects read a narrative account of behaviors about a
stranger. The description of behaviors were ambiguous, neither clearly hostile nor kind. Then
after reading the description, the participants made judgments on the traits of the target person.
This was done in an indirect manner. The participants were led to believe the trait ratings were
part of a different and unrelated experiment. The results indicated that the priming of hostility or
kindness influenced the type of judgments the participant made about the target. When the
subject had been primed with the hostile sentence task, hostile concepts were more accessible in
memory and the participants to deem the stranger description more hostile. This makes sense
since the hostility or kindness would be more accessible in the mind when someone is thinking
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of it prior to making a judgment. In other words, due to how memory and cognition processes
work, when a trait concept is activated, those ideas related to said trait will be foremost in the
mind. So if someone is primed with hostility traits, this trait will be activated in the mind and
therefore will have an impact on an impression that is made.
In another experiment, Srull and Wyer obtained similar results (1980). The participants
performed a priming task about traits (hostile or kind) with scrambled sentences and then read a
vague story or description of a person. The participants rated the person on different traits.
Results indicated that when the participants experienced a delay between the priming and the
information given to them, the rating of the target changed, that is the ratings related to the
priming decreased along with the length of the delay. This supports the idea of category
accessibility, since it is about how we unconsciously use what we have learned in our recent past
to make decisions or judgments. Similar to their findings in their earlier experiment, how
information is primed and encoded into memory can affect the impressions made on a ‘person’.
When the participants read the ambiguous information, they interpreted it in a manner that was
consistent with the accessible traits primed in their memory.
Trust
The current study is particularly interested in the trait trust. Ben-Ner and Halldorson
(2010) studied the ideas of trust and trustworthiness. Trust can be a broad definition. In their
study, the authors looked at measurements and implications of what trusting means. They
discovered that there are many different explanations for the definition of trust. Since this
experiment is studying trust and impression formation, we have a rather narrow definition of
trust. The operational definition of trust in this study is the ability to view someone as reliable or
dependable in a given situation.
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Dunn (2005) examined the role of emotions on feeling of trust. Her results indicated that
emotions with a positive valence like those of happiness or gratitude were found to increase trust.
Emotional states like anger were found to decrease trust. Since emotional states influence
people’s feelings of trust, people may make inaccurate judgments on trust simply due to their
incidental emotional state at the time. In a similar study, Skandrani-Marzouki and Marzouki,
(2010) simulated a hiring situation with priming influences done in a subliminal manner. One
group of participants unknowingly primed with anger, made different judgments (viewing target
as favorable or unfavorable) than the group primed with more positive emotions like happiness.
These decisions about whether or not to hire by rating the target as favorable or unfavorable was
related to the emotion primed by the experimenter. The positive emotion resulted in a more
favorable impression. So since trust is considered to be a more positive emotion, when primed
with trust, impressions may be manipulated. While the current study is not concerned with
participants’ emotional states, these articles show how easily traits can be manipulated. This
experiment will focus more on manipulating feelings of trust on the accessibility of the trait trust
on impressions.
Priming and Trust
Légal and colleagues (2012) examined what they call “goal priming” on a message. The
goal priming was related to trusting the message about the cleanliness of drinking water in their
experiment. Goal priming is similar to the priming with traits, only may focus on stimuli other
than traits to prime a particular goal. Participants were indirectly subliminally primed to either
trust the water message or were not primed at all. Results indicated that those who had been
primed to trust the message had a more positive evaluation of the message. Specifically, this is
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related to the current study in that it is dealing with priming and impression manipulation of
trust.
This experiment seeks to add to the understanding of priming and judgments. Past
research has focused more on other intentional states, such as priming hostility or kindness (Srull
& Wyer, 1979). Srull and Wyer’s (1979) experiment showed that priming influences the
impressions somebody makes on another individual. While they may have focused mainly on
hostility and kindness they also suggested that this could be applicable to many character traits.
They held the belief that once a subject has been primed with a particular trait, that their
judgments on not only that same trait but other related traits will be affected (Srull & Wyer,
1979). Knowing this information, we wanted to examine the effects of trustworthiness on
judgments. If Srull and Wyer (1979) believed that not only could priming work for a large
variety of traits but also and traits that the priming trait is related to, it would seem priming for
and measuring the change in trustworthiness would prove to be effective as well. Similar to the
experiment by Dunn (2005), judgments on trust can be influenced by various factors, including
internal and external factors like priming. We want to extend the past research on priming and
traits, such as hostility or kindness, to gain knowledge specifically about priming the trait
trustworthiness.
H1: We believe that subjects who are primed with sentences dealing with trustworthiness
will rate a stranger as more trustworthy while subjects primed with sentences dealing with
untrustworthiness will rate a stranger as more untrustworthy.
Method Overview:
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In our study, subjects were verbally primed through the task of unscrambling sentences.
These sentences either dealt with a trustworthy or untrustworthy person. These same subjects
were then asked to read a short description of a fictional character and make judgments about
that person’s trustworthiness.
Method
Participants
The participants in this study were students from a small college located in Southeastern
Indiana (Hanover College). Participants were chosen through a random sample of student email
addresses that was obtained from the Hanover College student directory. Participants were 26%
male and 74% female and from various ethnicities (86% Caucasian, 4% Hispanic, 4% Mixed,
3% Asian, 1.5% African, 1.5% African American). The ages of participants ranged from 18 to
22 years with the mean age being 19.86 years. While 200 potential subjects were contacted only
78 participated, 46 in the trustworthy condition and 22 in the untrustworthy condition.
Materials and Procedure
Participants were obtained through the use of a random sample. By choosing the subject
population of Hanover College, all student’s names were compiled into a spreadsheet and
randomized. The authors then chose to contact the first 200 names on the list. Emailed
participants were provided a short description of who the researchers were (Hanover College
students conducting a survey for a psychology class required experiment) and what our study
was about. Emailed participants were informed that the reason for our study was to figure out the
general thoughts or first impressions an individual makes on a stranger. Emailed participants
were also provided a link to the study if they chose to participate. There were two separate online
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forms of the survey, with one survey per condition (primed trustworthiness or primed
untrustworthiness). Subjects were randomly assigned which link they received. In each
experimental group, participants were prompted with ten sentences to unscramble, the one
difference being whether these sentences had a “trustworthy” them used to prime for
trustworthiness or an “untrustworthy” theme used to prime for untrustworthiness. This concept
of using scrambled sentences as a form of priming has been used before in a similar experiments
performed by Srull and Wyer (1979) and Bargh, Chen, and Burrows (1996). In the case of Srull
and Wyer (1979), their experiment used a sentence unscrambling task to prime subjects for either
hostility or kindness. While in the case of Bargh, Chen, and Burrows (1996), their experiment
used a sentence unscrambling task to prime for either rudeness or politeness. An example of the
type of sentence a participant saw in our experiment is: “Wife on his cheated he. = He cheated on
his wife.” or “Dependable is very he. = He is very dependable.” These sentences were created by
the authors and a full list, for each experimental group, can be found in the Appendix. These
sentences were kept short and simple so that there would not be a lot of confusion when
unscrambling. After the sentence unscrambling task the next step was for participants to read a
short paragraph introducing them to a fictional character. Each experimental group was
presented with the same short paragraph introducing them to the same fictional character. This
paragraph introduced subjects to “Joe” who was described in such a way that made his
trustworthiness ambiguous. This was done because we choose to model our character of “Joe”
after the character of “Donald” In Srull and Wyer’s (1979) experiment on priming using
scrambled sentences and a similar short paragraph. The paragraph that we used, which we
created, is as follows:
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Joe is a 27 year old male who received a good education from an accredited university.
Due to this education Joe was able to obtain a nice job at a bank where he was one of the
main people in charge. Joe’s job is very demanding and has to work late often, allowing
Joe to spend a lot of alone time in the bank. When Joe is not working he enjoys watching
television with his family. Joe particularly likes to watch crime solving and mystery
television shows, while trying to figure out how a presented crime could have been
performed better. Because of this interest Joe likes to dabble in writing stories about
average law-abiding citizens who have the desire to commit the perfect crime. While
writing these stories Joe often wonders, “If people could do anything they want without
getting caught, would they do it?”. Joe also has two young children who he adores and
likes to take them out for ice cream and to the park with the family dog weekly.
After reading the paragraph, each experimental group was given a list of 10 questions regarding
Joe’s trustworthiness and answered by using a rating scale ranging from one to four, with one
being “not at all likely” and four being “very likely”. This rating scale was purposely kept with
an even number so that there was no middle possibility for a subject to choose; they either had to
deem the fictional character as trustworthy or untrustworthy. An example question a participant
would encounter is: “You had Joe over to your dorm room the other day and he left his laptop
there. He desperately needs it but you are in class and don't have time to go get it for him. He
asks if he can borrow your keys just so he can go and get his laptop then he will bring your keys
right back. How likely are you to give Joe the keys to your room”. Similar questions were asked,
all of which can be found in the appendix as well.
Participants were first emailed and provided with a link to take our survey. This link was
either for a survey to complete a study on the effects of positive priming on trustworthiness or
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negative priming. Before the survey begun, participants had to first provide informed consent.
These agreeing participants then went on to complete a demographic questionnaire and then
proceeded to the sentence unscrambling task. The final part of the survey participants had to
complete contained the paragraph about Joe and the 10 questions intended to measure
trustworthiness. The average time of survey completion was about 10 minutes. After the survey
was completed, participants were debriefed as to what our experiment was studying and thanked
for their assistance.
Results
This study was designed to research the effects that priming has on a subject’s perception
of trustworthiness. As the researchers, we believed that when a participant was presented with
stimuli (unscrambling sentences tasks) dealing with trustworthiness they would then rate a
fictional character as trustworthy as well. The same hypothesis is applied for untrustworthy
stimuli and the same fictional character. To test this hypothesis we distributed a questionnaire
online, in which a subject first unscrambled a set of ten sentences then proceeded to read a short
fictional paragraph and answer ten short questions. These questions all used the same rating scale
as their answers, ranging from one (not at all likely) to four (very likely). The use of these ten
questions was to measure the amount of trustworthiness the subject felt towards the fictional
character. While we hypothesized that the type of priming would accordingly affect a subject’s
perception of an individual, this hypothesis was not supported. Figure 1 depicts our results that
we gathered from each individual in a scatterplot. In contrast to our predictions, this scatterplot
shows that the confidence intervals based on 78 data points, 46 in the trustworthy priming
condition and 32 in the untrustworthy, are approximately equal in both size and location.
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Figure 1. Means and 95% confidence intervals for ratings of trustworthiness by priming
condition.
Ratings were analyzed using a Welch’s t-test, t(74.2) = .096, p = .923. It is obvious from
this p-value that our results are not significant. Had they been significant we would have
expected a p-value less than .05. This lack of significance states that according to our results we
did not find a relationship between priming and an individual’s judgments of trustworthiness
towards a fictional character. It is important to note that to achieve this step of running the t-test
we first had to combine all 10 questions used to measure trustworthiness into one measure. This
was done by using Cronbach’s alpha where alpha = 0.8258.
Discussion
Although our hypothesis was not supported with our results, priming has been highly
successfully in several other experiments. Perhaps, one of the reasons we accepted the null
hypothesis in the current experiment was that our priming technique was not unconscious or
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subliminally done. For example, past research from Chartrand & Bargh (1996) supported the use
of subliminal priming with impression formations. They subliminally primed participants by
using the sentence unscrambling task, except the participants were led to believe that they were
involved in several unrelated experiments. In the current study it was clear that the sentence
construction task was directly related to the questionnaire about the impression of the
trustworthiness of Joe.
The controlled environment of a lab setting should also be considered for the future
directions of research on priming. In order to make the experiments appear unrelated and to use
subliminal priming, a lab setting is the best choice for this type of procedure. Although an online
survey can reach a wide amount of people, it would be difficult to convince the participants the
surveys online were two unrelated experiments to complete. Bargh & Pietromonaco, (1982)
discovered results in support of priming on impression formation. Their priming procedure was
subliminal and in a controlled lab setting.
The future direction of priming research should also seek to determine the use of different
traits in priming. Since past research on trait priming has been successful with hostility and
kindness traits (Srull and Wyer, 1980) it would be useful to determine whether only certain traits
work for priming impressions. Perhaps the trait trust would be more successfully primed in a
controlled lab experiment? Future research needs to determine how manipulative a variety of
traits are on impressions.
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Appendix
Unscrambling sentences task used to prime subjects is as follows:
Untrustworthy Sentences to unscramble:
1. He stole a wallet.
Wallet a he stole.
2. He broke into a house.
Broke into he a house.
3. She took some money.
Took she money some.
4. He cheated on his wife.
Wife on his cheated he.
5. She lied to me.
Me she lied to.
6. He was found guilty.
Was found he guilty.
7. He robbed a bank.
Bank robbed a he.
8. They committed credit card fraud.
Credit committed fraud card they.
9. She told her a secret.
Secret a told her she.
10. He is a criminal.
Criminal he is a.
Trustworthy sentences to unscramble:
1. He returned her lost wallet.
Returned he her wallet lost.
2. She goes to church.
Church she goes to.
3. He is an angel.
Angel is an he.
4. He is loyal
Loyal he is.
5. He is rewarded for his kindness.
Rewarded for he is his kindness.
6. She was very helpful.
Was she very helpful.
7. She is a great friend.
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Friend a she is great.
8. He is very dependable.
Dependable is very he.
9. She is responsible.
Responsible is she.
10. She let him borrow $20.
Let him she $20 borrow
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