Scientific Research Has Determined A Great Way To Judge If Someone Is Trustworthy Or Not

Who can you trust? In today’s rapidly-changing environment it isn’t easy to know who is trustworthy and who isn’t. Some folks are easier to trust than others, but does that truly make them trustworthy?

In an effort to find out, scientists have conducted several experiments and as a result, they believe they’ve determined a solid predictor of trustworthiness.

The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, involved a series of experiments using economic trust games and survey questions.

What exactly is a trust game? Psychology Today explains…

During the standard trust game, a person is given some money which she can either keep or pass to another person (the trustee). If she chooses to give the money to the trustee, the money multiplies; on the other hand, the trustee might choose to keep all the money and not give any of it back to the truster. Obviously, then, these games depend on how much the first person trusts the second.

The study also used other methods to assess personality and determine guilt-proneness, sense of responsibility, trust, and other variables.

What they determined was that that guilt-proneness is one of the strongest predictors of trustworthiness.

So what is guilt-proneness?

While guilt evokes the desire to repair the harm after a wrongdoing, guilt-proneness is related to the expectation of experiencing guilt in future and is thus associated with avoidance of wrongdoing in the first place.

The authors of the present paper hypothesized that guilt-prone individuals have a strong sense of responsibility and, therefore, are very trustworthy.

That guilt-prone people are not highly prosocial all the time but act prosocially when others are depending on them. Why? Because a guilt-prone individual is aware that another, by having trusted her, has made himself vulnerable. In other words, she is sensitive to what the other person anticipates, and so feels responsible to meet the other person’s expectations.

Prior to this study personality traits like honesty, humility, unconditional kindness, generosity, and agreeableness (friendly, sympathetic, cooperative) were used as high indicators of trustworthiness.

After this new research, however, guilt-proneness is a better predictor of trustworthiness than any of those other traits.

So, if you’re looking for someone to trust, find the person who you think will feel the most guilty if they do you wrong.

Either that, or just hang out with one of these guys. They’ll never let you down.

Learn more about this study at PsychologyToday.com.