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There's one almost-surefire way to tell if you can trust someone

Someone who is unconditionally kind is likely to be worthy of your trust, particularly when it comes to economic decisions, a recent study found: There's a strong correlation between kindness and trustworthiness. 

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Researchers in Germany conducted three experiments that all supported this conclusion, which they reported recently in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

trust fall
Would you trust them? genvessel/Flickr

In all three experiments, they assessed participants' personality traits based on the HEXACO Personality Inventory. The test measures six dimensions on a scale: Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience.

Participants then played the Trust Game, an evaluation developed in the 1990s that is frequently used in these types of studies. In it, the first player is given a sum of money and told to choose an amount to give to the second player. Whatever amount they pass on, Player One is told, will be multiplied (usually by three) before Player Two receives it. Then Player Two gets to decide how much to return to the first player.

Zero is an option for both players, and it's the one each would choose if they were making an emotionless calculation about hoarding as much as they could in the face of uncertainty.

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But in experiments, this almost never happens. The first player tends to give the second player more than half of the money, and usually gets back more than they gave. Social scientists have explained that this is because the first player trusts the second player to give them back some money in return, instead of sending them nothing.

But is there anything about Player Two that might clue us in to whether they are worthy of that trust?

Money Dollar Bills
Flicker/Steven Depolo

In this study, the researchers analyzed the relationship between the HEXACO personality traits and Player Two's level of trustworthiness. That trustworthiness was measured based on how much money they sent: If they sent more, that meant they scored higher on trustworthiness, since they were showing themselves to be worthy of Player One's trust.

The researchers found that those who scored higher on Honesty-Humility, something the researchers associate with kindness, were the ones who sent more money back to the first player. In other words, the kinder participants were also more trustworthy — perhaps by virtue of their generosity.

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That may seem obvious, but the researchers didn't find this correlation with any other personality trait. Previous studies have suggested trustworthiness might spring from agreeableness — of which kindness is only one component — or just be a response to a previous interaction.

But it also didn't matter how much money the first player sent, lead author of the study Isabel Thielmann told Tech Insider — if the second player was kinder, i.e. they scored higher on Honesty-Humility, they sent back more money.

"Importantly, the relation between Honesty-Humility and trustworthy behavior was not dependent on the level of prior trust as shown by the first player," she said. "This, in turn, supports the idea that the mechanism underlying the relation between Honesty-Humility and trustworthiness refers to unconditional kindness."

The sample sizes of the three experiments in the study were small: Each one had fewer than 200 participants. It can also be difficult to simulate real life, high-stakes decision-making situations in the lab, and it's important not to overgeneralize from the Trust Game. But the researchers did see the same results (kinder people were more trustworthy) all three times.

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Be kind to one another, and you could build more trust.

Psychology Research
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