Angry Women are More Trusting : A Mediational Analysis of Anger, Trust, and Social Distance

Abstract

How does anger influence trust? This study showed that angry women as compared to not angry women feel closer to their interaction partners and thus trust them more. However, men’s trust behavior was neither influenced by anger nor by social distance.Supporting Summary: Trust is essential to social life. Yet, prior work has largely ignored the relationship between emotions (e.g., anger) and trust, and how gender and perceived social distance influence this relationship is still not clear (Dunn & Schweitzer, 2005). To address this gap, the present study explores the ways in which anger, gender, and social distance influence individuals’ trust.Anger is associated with a high appraisal of certainty and with an approach motivation, therefore angry people make optimistic risk estimates and risk-seeking choices (Lerner & Keltner, 2000, 2001). In line with this finding, our first hypothesis states that people in the anger condition will be more daring when investing money with others, or in other words, trust others more than controls. Another important factor that is positively correlated with trust is the decrease of social distance that people feel toward others (Binzel & Fehr, 2013). Our second hypothesis is that perceived social distance will mediate the relationship between anger and trust. Moreover, we postulate that gender will moderate the above stated mediation. More specifically, because women tend to more socially oriented than men (Anderson & Blanchard, 1982), we assume that angry women’s trust of others will be more influenced by their perceived social distance (Buchan et al., 2008).The presented study used a 2 (Anger vs. Control) x 2 (Men vs. Women) factorial design (N = 107, with N = 56, 48.2% female in the anger condition; N = 51, 41.2% female in the control condition) to test these predictions. A directed-writing task (Strack et al., 1985) was utilized to induce anger, followed by a-shot trust game (Berg et al., 1995). Anger experienced in the writing task and the social distance that participants felt toward their partners in the trust game were measured.There was a significant interaction between the experimental conditions and gender on trust, F(1, 103) = 4.13, p < 0.05. Women but not men in the anger condition were found to trust their partners more than controls (p < 0.05). A moderated mediation model (Preacher et al., 2007) showed that women but not men in the anger condition felt less social distance toward their partners, subsequently trusting them more than women in the control condition (R2 = .205, p < 0.001). Based on these results, we conclude that women, but not men, were driven by anger in a way that they felt closer to and trusted their interaction partners more than in the control condition.