Is Warm Always Trusting? The Effect of Seasonality on Trustworthiness

Sensory marketing has shown that non-conscious triggers and sensory experiences influence consumers’ perceptions, judgments, and behaviors (Krishna 2012). The current work focuses on temperature and how it subsequently affects perceptions of trustworthiness. Past research often suggests warm (vs. cold) ambient temperatures increase feelings of social proximity (IJzerman and Semin 2009), and more directly, that warm temperatures increase interpersonal trust (Kang et al. 2011). We contend that ambient temperature is only part of the story. We incorporate research on thermoregulation, the need to maintain a core internal temperature for survival (Tavassoli 2009). Bruno, Melnyk, and Volckner (2017) found that when consumers were physically cold (warm) they perceived emotionally warm (cold) stimuli more positively. Thus, although past research has focused on ambient temperature in an absolute sense, it has yet to examine the effect in a relative sense (e.g., interaction of seasonality and indoor temperature). In the context of evaluating trust in service providers, we demonstrate that an unexpected ambient indoor temperature that contrasts with the temperature outside affects consumers’ trust.