Reputation in social perception: Validation of trustworthy and untrustworthy behavioural descriptions in European Portuguese

Abstract

Reputation is an important cue for person perception and adequate behaviour. Its influence on behaviour might override first impressions from faces and constitutes an important information forintegrating person perception and creating predictions of other’s behaviour. The purpose of the present study was to create and validate a set of sentences describing “trustworthy” and “untrustworthy” previous behaviour (reputation). We generated a set of 97 sentences that were divided into three groups: trustworthy, untrustworthy and neutral. Trustworthy sentences elicited higher perceived trustworthiness compared to both neutral and untrustworthy sentences. Untrustworthy sentences elicited lower perceived trustworthiness compared to neutral sentences. This material seems to be effective in manipulatingperceived trustworthiness and could be used as stimuli in the study of Spontaneous Trait Inferences