Who Uses Reputation Information for Their Decision to Trust?

Trust decisions often rely on a partner’s reputation, yet little is known about interindividual differences in how people use such information when deciding whom to trust. Across four pre-registered studies (total N = 1,171), we examined whether associations between trust-related personality traits and trust vary as a function of a trustee’s reputation. We focused on three traits that should differentially interact with reputation information: General Trust—the tendency to believe in the benevolence of others; Victim Sensitivity—the anxious expectation of being exploited by others; and Honesty-Humility—an individual’s dispositional prosociality. In Studies 1–3, participants acted as trustors in peer-to-peer car-sharing scenarios and rated either the trustworthiness of potential renters or their intention to rent out their car. In Study 4, participants made real, incentivized trust decisions in economic trust games with reputation cues based on actual behavior. Across studies, higher reputation consistently increased trust, and General Trust showed a broad positive association with trust. By contrast, Victim Sensitivity and Honesty-Humility showed reputation-contingent associations with trust; however, the specific interaction patterns varied across studies. Overall, trustor personality and trustee reputation jointly shape trust, yet the nature of this interplay differs across personality traits and the motivational tendencies they capture.