Because trust-related issues inherently involve uncertainty, we expected individuals' social-cognitive motivation to manage uncertainty – which is captured by their need for closure – to influence their level of trust in others. Through the results of six studies, we showed that higher need...

This paper reports an experiment examining the effect of social norms on pro-social behavior. We test two predictions derived from work in psychology regarding the influence of norms. The first is a 'focusing' influence, whereby norms only impact behavior when an individual's attention is drawn...