Trust and Distrust as Artifacts of Language: A Latent Semantic Approach to Studying Their Linguistic Correlates.

David Gefen,Kai R Larsen,Jorge E Fresneda

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00561

Abstract

Trust and distrust are crucial aspects of human interaction that determine the nature of many organizational and business contexts. Because of socialization-borne familiarity that people feel about others, trust and distrust can influence people even when they do not know each other. Allowing that some aspects of the social knowledge that is acquired through socialization is also recorded in language through word associations, i.e., linguistic correlates, this study shows that known associations of trust and distrust can be extracted from an authoritative text. Moreover, the study shows that such an analysis can even allow a statistical differentiation between trust and distrust—something that survey research has found hard to do. Specifically, measurement items of trust and related constructs that were previously used in survey research along with items reflecting distrust were projected onto a semantic space created out of psychology textbooks. The resulting distance matrix of those items was analyzed by applying covariance-based structural equation modeling. The results confirmed known trust and distrust relationship patterns and allowed measurement of distrust as a distinct construct from trust. The potential of studying trust theory through text analysis is discussed.

Highlights

Research ObjectiveAllowing that socialized knowledge is embedded in the language through the tendency of words to co-occur together across relevant documents, this study argues that such linguistic correlates can reveal much about trust and distrust—key socialization beliefs
This study demonstrated the ability to apply LSA and CBSEM combined to investigate the linguistic correlates of trust and distrust
The study showed that analyzing linguistic correlates can be applied to differentiate between trust and distrust—something survey research had difficulty in doing

Summary

Introduction

Research ObjectiveAllowing that socialized knowledge is embedded in the language through the tendency of words to co-occur together across relevant documents, this study argues that such linguistic correlates can reveal much about trust and distrust—key socialization beliefs. That proposition is supported by projecting questionnaire items about trust and distrust and their familiarity antecedent and a behavioral outcome on a semantic space (discussed below) that was built out of a relevant corpus of three psychology textbooks (Myers, 1998), and analyzing the resulting cosine distance. Trust and Distrust as Artifacts of Language matrix of those questionnaire items. The analysis shows that are expected theoretical correlations supported, and that trust and distrust can be statistically differentiated in this manner—something that survey research using questionnaires had difficulty doing. The ability to mine such knowledge from language may be another tool to study human behavior through text analysis in cases where surveys cannot be given to human subjects, where the context is unknown to them, and where constructs that cannot be differentiated such as trust and distrust need to be studied. We are not claiming that this method replaces surveys, only that it could complement survey research.

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