Emotions and Social Behaviours

Background

Awe is attracting increasing research interest because a number of recent studies have indicated its ability to encourage prosocial behaviours. Awe has been found to increase ethical decision-making and generosity (Piff et al., 2015), humility (Stellar et al., 2018) and willingness to volunteer (Rudd et al., 2012). Thus, awe has important implications for understanding and enhancing human relationships and society. However, no study has yet examined the influence of awe on trust. Trust is critical to successfully functioning societies and relationships, and is differentiated from other prosocial behaviours, such as generosity, because it involves reciprocal and interdependent outcomes (Yamagishi, 2011). The trusting individual’s outcomes are dependent on the behaviour of the person in whom they have placed their trust, entailing risk and vulnerability (Amir et al., 2021). Given this gap, this study investigates whether awe can enhance willingness to trust.

Research Questions / Hypotheses

Awe is attracting increasing research interest because a number of recent studies have indicated its ability to encourage prosocial behaviours. Awe has been found to increase ethical decision-making and generosity (Piff et al., 2015), humility (Stellar et al., 2018) and willingness to volunteer (Rudd et al., 2012). Thus, awe has important implications for understanding and enhancing human relationships and society. However, no study has yet examined the influence of awe on trust. Trust is critical to successfully functioning societies and relationships, and is differentiated from other prosocial behaviours, such as generosity, because it involves reciprocal and interdependent outcomes (Yamagishi, 2011). The trusting individual’s outcomes are dependent on the behaviour of the person in whom they have placed their trust, entailing risk and vulnerability (Amir et al., 2021). Given this gap, this study investigates whether awe can enhance willingness to trust.

Participants

63 participants have completed the study thus far. This study is ongoing. Participants' data will be excluded if they fail attention checks or are statistical outliers.

Methods

Participants first complete a series of questionnaires asking about their personality, wellbeing, social values, mindfulness, generalised trust, general cooperativeness and competitiveness, satisfaction with life, and quiet ego. Participants then complete one of three tasks: watch a virtual-reality video of the International Space Station (awe condition), watch a short BBC comedy video 'Walk on the Wild Side' (amusement condition) or complete a task with a plastic globe of the world (neutral condition). In the latter task, they are asked to count the three most commonly used colours on the globe, and the latitude and longitude lines. Following this, they play four resource-dilemma games (on a computer) to measure their willingness to trust, cooperate, punish and engage in non-social risk. They then complete questionnaires on the small-self, emotions felt during the experimental task, and demographics.

Results

Logistic regression and mediation analysis will be conducted to analyse data.

Implications

Results are incomplete and cannot be interpreted at this stage. A final report will be submitted upon study completion at the end of Semester 2.