“Do you still trust me?” Effects of Personality on Changes in Trust during an Experimental Task with a Human or Robot Partner

Abstract

In the current study, we investigated the effects of dispositional variables on self-reported trust and suspicion perceptions of one’s partner in a maze-running task. Dispositional variables affect the extent to which people perceive and encode information in their environment. Prior research has shown that dispositional variables interact with situational variables in expressing behaviors. In order to test the effects of three dispositional variables (i.e., dispositional trust, dispositional distrust, and dispositional suspicion) on self-reported trust and suspicion perceptions towards a partner (a human or a Nao robot), we ran two discontinuous growth models. Overall, we found that participants’ trust towards their partner decreased when the partner engaged in untrustworthy behaviors as expected. In addition, changes in trust perceptions towards the partner were predicted by participants’ level of dispositional trust. These results have implications for studying the effects of dispositional variables on context-dependent trust perceptions within the trust process.