Arousal en vertrouwen: in adverterende organisaties

This research tries to find a relation between arousal and trust. Trust is important in interaction between a customer and a company. With high trust, comes a higher buyer intention. A method of trying to get people to trust your company is through advertisements and commercials. These commercials can use different levels of arousal to help their purposes. The hypothesis tested was: Arousal influences the degree of trust in an advertising company. The reversed U-curve of arousal will become visible. A medium level of arousal leads to the highest level of trust. Derived from other studies, it was thought that low arousal leads to higher trust than high arousal. Three groups of each 25 participants were formed and got to see a commercial. The groups got to see the same commercial, with the only variable being different music in each group. Results show that when there is a medium level of arousal, trust is at the highest level. There is no significant difference found between the low and high arousal conditions, although the scores in the low arousal group are consistently higher than the scores in the high arousal group. The reversed U-shape seems applicable on this situation. Further research is required to find out what the precise relation is between arousal and trust.