Effect of Threat, Costly Signaling, and Religion on Trust Decisions

Trust was measured for a target profile that varied the target's religion and costly signaling behavior. Subjects were primed with a threat, romance, or neutral response previous to viewing the profile to determine if this had any effect on their trust ratings of the target. Participants were drawn from MTurk with ages ranging from 18 to 75 (M= 33.2) and various religious backgrounds (including 210 Christians, 190 atheists/agnostics, and 92 other religious believers). Participants were presented with the threat, romance, or neutral vignette, shown the target profile, and asked to rate the target's trustworthiness. There was no main effect of the vignette condition (p = .088) or costly signaling (p = .099) on the target's trustworthiness. There was a main effect of target religion (p = .006) wherein the Muslim target was trusted more than the Catholic target. These findings do not replicate previous findings on religion, costly signaling, and trust.