Trust in context: Examining cognitive control in trust decisions

Social trust is a key component to relationships between individuals and within communities. Failure to correctly choose to trust or not can have significant consequences in interpersonal relationships, employment, and more. While work has identified cognitive and affective processes relevant to trust, relatively less has examined the role of cognitive control during trust decisions and its interaction with affective processing. This study modifies an expectancy AX task to incorporate trusting behavior in two ways: first by establishing the trust component in a similar framework as AX variants and then by adding an emotional distractor during the paradigm. We conducted a between-subjects analysis of task performance on undergraduates (n = 262) in 2017-2018 to examine the efficacy of the new variant, the effect of an emotional distractor on task performance, and individual difference effects related to social trust. We found that the Trust-AX paradigm provided performance patterns consistent with proactive control of trust decisions. Adding a distractor decreased proactive control as the distractor increased in emotional salience. Last, individuals who had greater social distrust also performed worse on proactive control, suggesting a potential shared mechanism with cognitive control in trust decisions. The Trust-AX paradigm may be a useful measure to examine cognitive control during trust and provide insights into how "cold" cognitive processes interact with affective processes to influence trust. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).