On the effect of social trust on consumers' information processing, persuasion and choice

Social trust – one’s opinion about the integrity, honesty, and fairness of others (GSS, Mutz (2005))– plays an important, yet not fully understood role in consumer behavior. This thesis contributes to the study of trust by comparing the effects of a high versus a low social trust mind-set on consumers’ processing strategies of advertising claims and choice behavior.;Major contributions of my thesis to marketing are the findings that consumers with a high social trust mind-set are more receptive to subjective advertising claims and prefer new products, whereas consumers with a low social trust mind-set are more receptive to objective advertising claims and prefer status quo options.;Results from four studies demonstrate that consumers with a low social trust mind-set think more analytically whereas consumers with a high social trust mind-set think more experientially. An additional study shows that consumers with a high social trust mind-set are more likely to choose new products, whereas consumers with a low social trust mind-set are more likely to choose status quo options. Specifically, consistent with Analytical Experiential Theory (S. Epstein, 1990), participants with a low-trust mind-set experienced greater fluency when processing objective advertising claims and performed better in the recognition tasks of these claims, whereas participants with a high-trust mind-set experienced greater fluency when processing subjective advertising claims and performed better in recognizing them. Moreover, I show that the effect of a social trust mindset is independent of the effect of market place trust, which is predicted by the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM – (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986)). My comparison of the Analytical Experiential Theory with the ELM framework shows that while the latter is more suitable to address the effect of market place trust; the former is more suitable to address the effect of social trust. I further show that consumers with a high social trust mind-set are more likely to choose new products while consumers with a low social trust mind-set are more likely to choose status quo options. In addition, consumers’ regulatory foci (E. Tory Higgins, 1997) are shown to mediate this effect. Based on these results, I develop the notion of stimulus-relevant and stimulus-irrelevant trust, discuss the critical differences between these constructs and suggest several avenues for future research.