Implicit measurement of trust in professions: Automatic attitude activation task
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Implicit measurement of trust in professions: Automatic attitude activation task Guofang Liu 1
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract The trust levels that participants report on questionnaires may be biased by the participant’s motivation to appear like a trusting person. Few studies have found participants’ explicit trust to be inconsistent with their implicit trust. According to social cognition theory, the inconsistency between explicit and implicit trust indicates the importance of an implicit measurement of trust. However, trusting has been socially expected in previous research, which facilitates participants’ motivation to deliberate their responses on questionnaires. As a result, the inconsistency between explicit and implicit trust that previous research revealed may be context dependent. This study examined this possibility by investigating college students’ implicit trust, implicit distrust and explicit trust toward eight professions. The study found that 1) college students’ explicit trust did not correlate with their implicit trust; 2) participants’ implicit trust positively correlated with their implicit distrust which indicates that trust and distrust are two separate but linked constructs; 3) participants’ trust behavior tendencies can be predicted by implicit trust and implicit distrust. We conclude that the automatic attitude activation task is valid in implicit trust measurement, and implicit and explicit measurements of trust can and should complement each other. Keywords trust . implicit trust . distrust . automatic attitude activation
Introduction Trust is in an actively researched domain in social sciences that refers to individual’s willingness to believe that his or her partner will take the individual’s interest into account; this situation encourages the individual to dare to make decisions that may be exploited (Balliet and Van Lange 2013; Mayer et al. 1995). To measure trust, individuals are frequently asked to report their trust willingness on questionnaires (e.g., Choi et al. 2014; Holm and Nystedt 2008; Xin et al. 2013). For example, individuals may be asked to describe their agreement with the statement, BMy partner would look out for my interests^ on a 6-point scale (Singh et al. 2015). Although questionnaires have been widely used, recent studies have revealed that individuals’ trust expressed on questionnaires Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-018-9856-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Guofang Liu [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, College of Politics of National Defence University, Shanghai 201600, China
is frequently inconsistent with their implicit trust or actual behavior (Burns et al. 2006; Ermisch et al. 2009; Glaeser et al. 2000; Zhang et al. 2013). In general, individuals report higher trust levels on questionnaires than they actually demonstrate in their behavior (Burns and Conchie 2010). The inconsisten
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