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On the Origins of Trust

digital.lib.washington.edu · 484 words · saved by 1 readers

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, my project tackles the following questions: What is trust? How do we measure trust? And where does trust come from? I do so by offering a concrete and measurable definition of trust--what I call relational trust--as well as a research design--vignette experiments--that captures its core elements. I 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, I propose a number of novel and pre-existent hypotheses addressing each major source. My secondary goals in this dissertation are to (a) investigate the relationship between political institutions and an alternative microfoundation known as general social trust, and (b) explore if and how general social trust impacts relational trust. I argue that my new conceptualization, unique research design, and novel propositions identifies foundations of trust that have yet to be observed in the literature. This project employs two sources of data. First, I collected data from a variety of cross-national public-opinion data sets (including the World Values Survey and the European Values Study) to form a repeated cross-sectional time-series pseudo-panel spanning 30 years (1980 to 2009), 74 countries, and 248 observations. With this data, I employed linear regressions, random-effects models, and fixed-effects models to test hypotheses regarding the relationship between political institutions and general social trust. Second, I administered two novel vignette experiments to two distinct populations of Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk workers (N = 1,276 and N = 1,322) and Universit

Abstract 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, my project tackles the following questions: What is trust? How do we measure trust? And where does trust come from? I do so by offering a concrete and measurable definition of trust--what I call relational trust--as well as a research design--vignette experiments--that captures its core elements. I decompose the sources of trust into four analytical…

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