People are more likely to trust those who grew up with less money than those who went to private school.
Research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that those who had a lower socio economic status in childhood were more likely to be considered trustworthy.
“We found that in general, having some experience in lower social class contexts in your life, whether in your childhood or now, can sometimes make people to act as if they trust you more. However, it is only when this experience came in childhood that people actually trust you more—that is, it is only then that they expect you to be more trustworthy,” lead researcher Kristin Laurin, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia told Theravive.
“Trust is a fundamental building block of human cooperation—people whom others trust enjoy some individual advantages, and societies where people generally trust each other also are generally better off. So if social class contexts can influence who we trust, that seemed particularly important to understand, especially in the context of the soaring economic inequality we are currently seeing in so many countries worldwide.”
To find out what makes people trust others in the first place, the researchers conducted a number of experiments with more than 1900 participants.
In one of the experiments, those participating were asked to play a trust game with another person. The other person was in fact not real but a fictional profile.
Some of the profiles described people who grew up with less money, worked part time or attended public school. Other profiles described a person from a more privileged background, who mentioned going to private school or taking vacations in Europe in their profile.
As part of the experiment, participants were given 10 raffle tickets to go in the draw for two $100 gift cards.
The participants were given the option to transfer their tickets to another play and were told that the tickets would then be tripled, and the other player could decide if they wanted to return any number of tickets to the original holder.
The researchers noted that the number of raffle tickets participants transferred to another player gave an indication of how much they behaviorally trusted the other player.
The participants transferred more tickets to those with a profile that stated they were from a lower class than a higher class.
The research didn’t determine why a person’s socio economic status in childhood may impact how people trust them, but Laurin has a few ideas.
“I can think of two possibilities—one is that this is something we say to make ourselves feel better about inequality in the world. If we can say something nice about someone who has faced financial disadvantage, especially if it wasn’t their fault (they were just a child, after all!) it can make it seem like there is some compensation for the disadvantage,” she said.
“A different possibility is that there some kind of signal that we’re picking up on (and possibly exaggerating or distorting). For example, there’s research showing that people who grow up in lower class cultural contexts tend to develop a sense of self that’s embedded in a network of relationships with other people, while people who grow up in higher class cultural contexts tend to develop a sense of self that’s more independent. Perhaps we observe some traces of those, and mentally equate independence with selfishness.”
Laurin says the research highlights that class based stereotypes can influence how people trust others, but that timing could be an important factor.
“The take home message is that class-based stereotypes differ depending on timing. That is, if two people have the exact same set of socioeconomic experiences, we might have really different impressions of them depending on when during their lifespan those experiences occurred” she said.
“One question we’re asking in follow-up studies is whether this turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy: If I don’t trust you, maybe that makes you feel like I don’t deserve much from you, so you’ll be willing to cheat me whenever you can. Or at the very least, if I don’t trust you, I never give you a chance to prove to me that I should have. So it could be that our stereotypes elicit exactly the behavior we expect in other people. We’re also interested in how people learn from having their expectations confirmed/disconfirmed: If I trust someone who grew up poor, but they betray my trust, do I give them a second chance? Or do I learn that my stereotype was completely wrong and never trust them or anyone like them ever again?”