Abstract: Theoretical analysis indicates that the trust of households in the society will affect their consumption behaviors. The increase of trust in other members of the society will reduce family leisure, thereby the household income and total consumption will be increased. Simultaneously, the increase of household trust can also change their substitutions among different categories of goods, which means to consume more commodities with uncertain quality and less commodities with relative stable quality. By making use of the data from China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this paper recognize the causal relationship with the instrumental variable method, and the causal relationship between trust and consumption behavior is also verified by the empirical research. The study also finds out that, compared with commodity consumption, the quality of service consumption has a higher uncertainty, therefore, the household trust can exert greater influence on service consumption, such as catering, entertainment, tourism and education, etc..

Key words: social trust; consumption behavior; quality uncertainty