Implicit measurement of trust in professions: Automatic attitude activation task

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.