You are what you do, but can I trust you ? The relationship between attributions and trust in person perception

In order to have a better understanding of our environment, we constantly seek to determine the causes for peoples' behaviour. Dispositional attributions inform us of enduring properties in people and provide us with a perceived sense of control over our social surroundings. The present research examined whether attributing dispositional causes to other people's behaviour would predict participants' trust towards them. Participants (N = 54) were confronted with positive and negative behaviours of 32 hypothetical individuals and subsequently played the Trust Game with them. Skin conductance response (SCR) was recorded in order to test the relationship between participants' arousal and attributions, as postulated by the Somatic Marker Hypothesis (SMH)..