Trust and Trust Funds: How Others’ Childhood and Current Social Class Context Influence Trust Behavior and Expectations

Abstract

Trust is vital for success in all kinds of social interactions. But how do people decide whether an individual can be trusted? One factor people may consider is that individual’s social class. We hypothesize that people trust others from lower social class contexts more than others from higher class contexts; we also consider nuances between current and childhood class context and between trust as a behavior and trust as an expectation. Five preregistered studies (total N = 1,934, with three of five studies including a within-subjects component), and 12 preregistered replications summarized in the supplement, yielded two sets of findings. First, people consistently behaviorally trusted others whose childhoods were spent in low-class (compared to high-class) contexts and expected them to honor that trust. These effects were mediated by perceived morality. Second, people behaviorally trusted others currently in low-class (compared to high-class) contexts, but they did not expect these individuals to honor that trust or perceive them as moral. Instead, the effect of current class was linked to altruism. Our findings emerged in samples drawn from different populations, across varying manipulations of social class, in actual and hypothetical decisions, and with imaginary targets and real acquaintances. We consider implications for the psychology of trust and of social class.