PI: Edgar Kiser Co-PI: Blaine Robbins University of Washington
Trust is central to the development and growth of social and economic exchange. The goals of this dissertation project are to identify factors that promote trust, to understand the situational features that enable trust formation, and to pinpoint the dispositional sources of trust. Given the widespread interest in trust across the social sciences, this project will test theoretical propositions found in sociology, political science, economics, social psychology, and philosophy. To accomplish this, the investigators will administer a web-based survey consisting of two hypothetical scenarios - a "car repair" scenario and "group project" scenario - to a large subject pool of online participants. This will be used to measure characteristics of trust and trustworthiness experienced by the participants. With this integrative approach, the investigators hope to construct a more comprehensive framework for the study of trust that resolves interdisciplinary debates about its conceptualization and operationalization.
Broader Impacts: With globalization and cosmopolitanism continuing to increase, understanding the sources of trust is an enduring issue for social scientists. If successful, results might inform policymakers of the socio-demographic factors that promote not only trust, but also social relationships, economic transactions, and civil society among diverse populations. Furthermore, examining how trust forms under market and non-market conditions has applied implications for both economic growth and business administration. This research also has a significant education component, leading to the training of a graduate student who will eventually mentor and teach future students multifactorial vignette designs. Finally, the research involves modifications to a widely used open-source software program for web-based surveys, modifications that will be made freely available to interested researchers.
Despite decades of interdisciplinary research on trust, issues of conceptualization and measurement remain, which has created a fragmented literature with little consensus about the origins of trust. To address these shortcomings, our project tackles the following questions: What is trust? How do we measure trust? And where does trust come from? We do so by offering a concrete and measurable definition of trust—what we call relational trust—as well as a research design—vignette experiments—that captures its core elements. We decompose the sources of trust into four analytical components: characteristics of the truster, characteristics of the trustee, characteristics of the exchange relationship, and characteristics of the social forces external to or beyond the exchange relationship. From this, we propose a number of novel and preexistent hypotheses addressing each major source. Our secondary goal in this project is to explore if and how general social trust impacts relational trust. We argue that our new conceptualization, unique research design, and novel propositions identifies foundations of trust that have yet to be observed in the literature. This project employs multiple sources of data. We administered two novel vignette experiments to two distinct populations of Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk workers (N = 1,276 and N = 1,322) and University of Washington undergraduate students (N = 884 and N = 841). With this data, we employed hierarchical linear regressions and multilevel mixed-effects multiple mediator models to investigate and adjudicate between the four analytical sources of relational trust. Taken together, we show that relational trust has varied and numerous foundations. We find that characteristics of a truster (e.g., general social trust and particular social trust), characteristics of a trustee (e.g., perceived competence and motivation), and social forces external to a truster-trustee exchange relationship (e.g., binding contracts) all effect relational trust, while weak evidence is detected for characteristics of a truster-trustee exchange relationship (i.e., social identity). We also find that causal attributions and social constraints interact in their influence on relational trust, and that other-praising emotions such as gratitude and admiration serve as plausible mechanisms connecting perceived motivations to relational trust. Overall, perceived motivations and commitment (a characteristic of a trustee) exert the greatest impact on relational trust. These results support the idea that people rely on multiple sources of information within, between, and beyond individuals when forming trust.
