Individual swift trust and cooperation in emergency rescue team members

Abstract

Critical incidents, happened frequently in recent years, made high requests to emergency rescue work. Emergency rescue team is a kind of temporary teams in which the members often have little prior history of working together and may never meet each other in person. Hence, the trust relationship of emergency rescue team cannot develop gradually over time based on an individual's cognitive assessment of the other person's behaviour as the traditional way do, and swift trust should be built up to meet the new demand. This study manipulated team member characteristics and team member behaviour to empirically test a theoretical model of swift trust formation and its influence on team cooperation. The results indicate that category-based and third-party recommendation based processing dominates the initial formation of swift trust, and the in-group bias and the recommendation and evaluation from third party directly influence the team members' swift trust toward the other team member, and swift trust directly influences the cooperation between the team members. (5 pages)