When trust comes easy: Articulatory fluency increases transfers in the trust game

Cooperation is paramount to harvest the benefits of specialization and division of labor. At the same time, cooperation brings along the risk of betrayal. To mitigate this risk, people may form expectations regarding another person’s trustworthiness based on previous encounters. However, if strangers are encountered, decision makers have to rely on their intuitions to predict others’ intentions and behavior. Previous research has shown that the positive affect triggered by the mere ease of processing some stimulus (fluency) is often used as information in intuitive judgments. In the current set of studies, we assign names to trustees in economic trust games and observe the amount of resources invested in the cooperation as a behavioral measure of trust. We show that trustees carrying either real surnames (Experiment 1) or artificially created names (Experiment 2) which are fluent were trusted more. We also show that high fluency of a name increases trust even if the selection of the name cannot be attributed to its bearer (Experiment 3). While the effect also prevails in repeated incentivized trust games (Experiment 4), it is attenuated if participants play only a single round of the game (Experiment 5).