Two-Component Model of General Trust: Predicting Behavioral Trust from Attitudinal Trust

Abstract

General trust constitutes a critical aspect of social capital that facilitates democratic governance and economic prosperity of a society. Despite its theoretical importance, attitudinal measures of general trust often fail to predict actual trusting behavior in laboratory testing. We suspected that the failure of currently available measures of trust in predicting behavioral trust stems from the overly consequentialist approach to defining trust. We proposed that measures of attitudinal trust succeed in predicting behavioral trust when they tap both the responder's belief that his/her trust will be honored and his/her preference to be a trusting person. We constructed a new measure of general trust that includes both of these aspects. using a non-student sample of trust game players (N = 470), we demonstrated that the newly constructed measure better predicts behavioral trust in a trust game and other related games, especially when the participant's social-value orientation is controlled.