Do you feel obliged to trust in strangers? The role of obligations, desires and expectations on trust

What motivates people to place trust in strangers-the sense that they ought to trust, or the feeling that they want to? Competing perspectives suggest that trust may be driven either by obligations or by desires. In two studies, we tested the role of these motivational forces in the tendency to trust strangers using a binary trust game in both an online setting (Study 1, n = 241; Study 2, n = 275) and a laboratory context (Study 1, n = 163). Our results confirm that both obligations and desires are good predictors of trust in an online platform. However, contrary to our hypothesis, wanting to trust had a greater relevance than feeling the obligation to trust in the laboratory setting. We discuss the results in terms of the interplay between norms, emotions, and preferences.