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Social interactions unfold within networks of relationships. How do beliefs about others’ social ties shape—and how are they shaped by—expectations about how others will behave? Here, participants joined a fictive online game-playing community and interacted with its purported members, who varied in terms of their trustworthiness and apparent relationships with one another. Participants were less trusting of partners with untrustworthy friends, even after they consistently showed themselves to be trustworthy, and were less willing to engage with them in the future. To test whether people not only expect friends to behave similarly but also expect those who behave similarly to be friends, an incidental memory test was given. Participants were exceptionally likely to falsely remember similarly behaving partners as friends. Thus, people expect friendship to predict similar behavior and vice versa. These results suggest that knowledge of social networks and others’ behavioral tendencies reciprocally interact to shape social thought and behavior.
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This content will become publicly available on January 1, 2026
Trustworthiness: an adaptationist account
The concept of TRUSTWORTHINESS plays a role in the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of friendships, marriages, and cooperative relationships from small to large scales. Here, we analyze TRUSTWORTHINESS under the assumption that such concepts evolved to guide action adaptively. Intuition and research suggest that actors trust targets who have not engaged in betrayals. However, this perspective fails to capture certain real-world behaviors (e.g., when two people cheating on their spouses enter a relationship with each other and expect mutual fidelity). Evolutionary task analysis suggests that TRUSTWORTHINESS is structured to help actors address challenges of extending trust, where actors may gain or lose from doing so. In six experiments with American adults (N=1,718), we test the hypothesis that TRUSTWORTHINESS tracks not only (i) whether targets refrain from betraying trust when given opportunities, but also (ii) the impact of betrayal on the actor. Data generally support this hypothesis across relationships (friendships, romantic, professional): Actors deem non-betrayers more trustworthy than betrayers, but also deem betrayers more trustworthy when betrayals benefit actors. TRUSTWORTHINESS may incline actors to trust to those who refrain from betraying others—a potent signal of reluctance to betray oneself—while also favoring those who betray others if it serves oneself.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2340942
- PAR ID:
- 10559624
- Publisher / Repository:
- Elsevier
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Evolution and Human Behavior
- Volume:
- 46
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1090-5138
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 106648
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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