Learning to trust individuals based on prior observational learning in the context of existing social groups

Trust is essential to social interactions and our decisions to trustare not only determined with how trustworthy someone is but by whatwe believe about their group membership. Here we investigated howparticipants observationally learn to trust or distrust one of two eth-nic groups and then use that knowledge when interacting with novelmembers of those groups. Overall we found that participants quicklyadapted to actual trustworthiness of their partners, irrespective oflearned group characteristics and ethnic group. However, participantswere learned more observationally from ethnic ingroups compared tooutgroups. Participants rated ethnic ingroups less favourably in howtrustworthy they perceived them when that group had been presentedas being trustworthy. Trust is largely an adaptive process to actualcircumstances, but people’s tendency to treat in- and outrgroups dif-ferently can interfere with people’s abilities to fully adapt to interactionpartners actual behaviour.