Toxic speech, fragile trust: How hostile comments about women shape their trust? - Part 1

Our goal is to find out whether engaging in misogynistic and sexist interactions online changes women’s trust. We will take a look at generalized trust, trust towards men, and women. The study will be divided into two parts. In the first part, participants will be exposed to misogynistic content, i.e., they will receive a comment containing stereotypical gender-related statements in response to a post they published. The study will be conducted in an interaction resembling social media. In the second part, the dependent variable—trust—will be measured. Trust will be operationalized as a self-reported response to questionnaire items and as the amount of money transferred by the participant in the so-called “investment game” (trust game). In this game, two players participate: Player A (the investor) and Player B (the trustee). Both “participants” receive the same, predetermined amount of money (in this study: 20 points, which can be exchanged for prizes). Player A decides what portion of this amount to transfer to Player B. The transferred sum is then multiplied by a fixed factor (in this case: x3), simulating a return on investment. Player B receives the increased amount and decides how much of all the points he or she is willing to return to Player A. The amount transferred by Player A serves as an indicator of their trust in the other participant, while Player B’s decision allows us to assess their willingness to reciprocate trust and their level of fairness. In this study, participants will play three rounds of the game, serving as the investor in each round. In every round, they will play with a different partner, according to the following scenario: a man, a woman, and a person of unspecified gender. In the self-report measure, participants will be asked to indicate their level of trust toward men, women, and people in general. The main independent variables to be manipulated are: (1) the gender of the comment’s author: male, female; (2) the type of comment received: misogynistic, neutral; (3) the gender of the person the participant evaluates in terms of perceived trustworthiness (in the second part of the study, three variants: man, woman, person of unspecified gender – both behavioral and self-reported measures). In total, this yields 4 comparison groups within which the study will be conducted. The study will be complemented by a questionnaire section that measures the following metrics: demographic characteristics (age, education, place of residence, native language), social media use, political preferences, and socioeconomic status.