The Effects of Arbitrary Social Comparison on Trust and Risky Decision-Making

Numerous fields have demonstrated that our decisions are guided by social information, and one important piece of social information is social comparison. Previous research has suggested that social status can influence trust, but most prior studies examining the influence of social comparison on trust decisions employed social comparison contexts that potentially “justify” the difference in social status, such as performing better/worse in a task. The current study investigated how, instead, interpersonal trust and risk-related decisions are made after experiencing arbitrarily manipulated social comparison contexts. In addition, the study directly compared people’s behaviors in trust and risk environments under different social positions in a single experimental paradigm. Across two experiments (Experiment 1: discovery sample, N = 302; Experiment 2: validation sample, N = 299), we showed that exposure to randomly manipulated social comparison contexts significantly influenced participants’ economic allocation decisions, their perceived relative ranks, and their reported levels of envy towards their target of comparison. However, our findings suggest that participants’ subsequent decision-making regarding interpersonal trust and risk-taking were not affected by this arbitrary-based social comparison. Our results also show that participants perceived risk and trust environments differently, with smaller amounts invested in the risk scenario than in the trust scenario. Overall, our findings indicate which behaviors and feelings are more likely to be affected by being randomly placed in a favorable or unfavorable social comparison scenario, and increase our understanding of trust and risk across social comparison scenarios.