AN INVESTIGATION OF AWE AND ITS EFFECTS ON TRUST AND DISHONESTY

Abstract

This study investigates whether awe would increase trust and decrease honesty via the effect of the small self. Participants were recruited from National University of Singapore and they were tasked to play two games: Trust game and the Coin flip game, which assessed trust and dishonesty, respectively. Results revealed that awe did not have significant effects on trust and dishonesty of individuals. However, awe was found to have significantly increased the sense of small self in individuals, keeping in line with existing findings of prior papers. Males were also found to trust more than females, which also lies with existing findings. The current study presents with a tough test of honesty (Coin flip game), which reflects real life situations such as the ongoing serious cases of e-commerce and love scams in Singapore, where people behave dishonestly in relationships based on trust. Future studies could investigate the effects of awe on trust and dishonesty by implementing stronger stimuli of awe and better measures of awe which includes physiological measures on top of the existing self-report measures.