Probing the role of institutional stereotypes in Americans’ evaluations of hazard-managing institutions

Abstract

Potential effects of institutional stereotypes on trust in hazard-managing organizations have been little explored. Americans’ views of attributes of government agencies, corporations, and non-profit advocacy groups (which try to influence policy) were probed in three surveys 2014–2016. Top-down ratings of positively and negatively phrased institutional attributes were based upon either perceived beliefs of ‘most Americans’ or the respondents themselves. Advocacy groups were rated most positive and least negative, and agencies the reverse, with corporations largely in the middle. Inter-individual differences in demographics, political ideology and interest, and worldviews produced modest variations in these views, supporting attributes’ culturally shared (i.e. stereotypical) nature. Explained variance in trust in institutions significantly increased (if with small to moderate effects) with the addition of stereotypes, particularly positive ones, controlling for other predictors. Institutional stereotypes may hold promise as complementary heuristics in citizen judgments of trust in hazard-managing organizations when they lack motivation or opportunity for situation-specific information; their effects when controlling for the latter (e.g. salient value similarity) remain to be tested.