Trust, Fairness and Helpfulness of Japan and Slovak University Students

Abstract

Introduction. Trust is becoming one of the serious problems of university education, both in terms of the quality of education itself and in terms of the quality of knowledge, skills and competences that students and graduates acquire. Based on the level of perceived trust, students decide how strong and persistent their pro-social motivation will be, i.e. their perception of fairness and helpfulness and, above all, the extent to which students will be willing to apply these attributes towards others. Purpose and methods. With the use of analysis, synthesis, comparison, abstraction, generalization, induction, deduction, modeling, etc., the purpose of the paper is to study trust of higher education students closely related to the topic of fair and helping behavior. All of these three phenomena are investigated from both perspectives: passive (in situations when they are received by a student from other entities) and active (in situations when they are actively performed by the student and are addressed toward the others). The empirical part presents the results of a questionnaire survey performed on n = 405 Japan students and n = 443 Slovak students, intended to find possible interrelations in their opinions regarding the general trust, fairness and helpfulness. Results. In the question aimed at expressing the opinion whether people can be trusted, or people cannot be too careful, as many as 68.89 % of Japanese and 66.82 % of Slovak respondents opted for the latter. 81.72 % of Slovak and 69.14% of Japan respondents preferred the opinion that people try to be fair. In the field of providing help, two thirds of the respondents (65.01 % and 69.63 %) expressed that people are generally mostly just looking out for themselves. Conclusions and discussions. The novelty of the paper stems from its theoretical, empirical as well as discussion part which confirm that it is useful to search the university students’ trust, fairness and help from the viewpoint of mutual dependences existing between them. The perceived trust influences the extent and quality of furtherly applied trust, fairness and helpfulness; the perceived fairness predetermines the furtherly applied fairness, trust and helpfulness, and simultaneously, the help taken from others build the student’s helpfulness, trust & trustworthiness, and fairness.