Amount Of Trust Research Articles

Towards a Dynamic Model of Interpersonal Trust: The Role of Communicative Action in Workflow Negotiation

This article focuses on the process affecting interpersonal trust in the workflow of organizations. We propose a dynamic model which highlights the impact of interpersonal communicative action in ongoing task negotiations in trust formation among organization members. According to our model, individuals approach initial negotiations with a baseline of trust in their organization which influences their initial level of cooperativeness and assertiveness when engaging in interpersonal task negotiations. Individuals' levels of cooperativeness and assertiveness then influences their communicative action (i.e., information acquisition, selection, and transmission), which, in turn, impacts the amount of trust these individuals perceive toward their counterpart (i.e., interpersonal trust). Finally, interpersonal trust impacts trust in the organization as a whole, at which point new tasks build on the previous cycle of negotiation and trust formation. We conclude by highlighting the conceptual contribution of the paper and its implications for both future research and organizational practices related to trust formation and workflow coordination.

Culture, Cooperation, and the General Welfare

Solutions to social dilemmas require cooperation. Given that there are commonly multiple avenues for cooperation, sometimes social dilemmas require coordination of strategies in addition to sufficient cooperation to be successful. This study examines one social dilemma where such coordination is necessary: supporting the general welfare. Using World Values Survey data from 33 nations, we compare active membership in charitable organizations versus attitudes toward government welfare programs as examples of two different types of cooperation. We argue that culture influences the form of cooperation a group adopts via the amount of trust it generates. Specifically, individualist cultures promote relatively high levels of trust, which produce first-order cooperation (here, involvement in charitable organizations). Collectivist cultures generate relatively low trust levels, facilitating second-order cooperation (here, greater support for government welfare programs). Findings support our arguments and thus suggest that culture, mediated by trust, shapes individuals’ perceptions about creating and sustaining public goods.

The social implications of location-based services: an observational study of users

Location-based services (LBS) are applications capable of utilising the position of a device, and its user, in the provision of a value-added service. With such applications comes the ability for an individual's location to be monitored either willingly or covertly by others, thus introducing a set of challenges from a social perspective. This article reports on the results of an observational study that required participants to maintain a digital location chronicle – global positioning system data log, daily diary entry and personal reflection – over a 2-week period. The primary aim of this exercise was for participants to observe, reflect and record their experiences during and at the completion of the participant observation, in order to reveal the ensuing collective implications. This study is a further research based on previous work concerning LBS user attitudes (Abbas 2010), and as such concentrates on the Gen-Y or young adult consumer group. This investigation considers additionally the importance of LBS within a social context, whereby participants are prompted to reflect on their willingness to be monitored or tracked by a partner, parent, friend, employer and/or stranger. The results are presented in terms of the social implications. The dominant themes in the respective relationship categories are presented in each context. It was noted that participants’ readiness to grant access to their location information is heavily dependent on the amount of trust existing within a specific relationship, whether there is a perceived privacy threat, the amount of control a participant wishes to maintain, and if there is concern in relation to personal security and safety being compromised. Additional technological and device-related issues were also observed.

Addressing Racial Healthcare Disparities: How Can We Shift the Focus from Patients to Providers?

“In contrast to patients’ trust in clinicians, clinicians’ trust in patients has not been investigated.” So write Moskowitz et al., whose study, published in this issue of JGIM1 is the first to show that primary care providers’ trust in their patients (indigent patients with HIV who were part of a longitudinal study of pain) was lower for non-whites than whites, despite the fact that there were no actual racial differences in patient characteristics that might be expected to affect trust, such as patients’ self-reported illicit drug use and misuse of opioids. Trust in this study was assessed using a scale that asked providers to indicate how confident they were that the patient would engage in various behaviors indicating that the patient could be trusted (e.g., “will not manipulate the office visit for secondary gain” such as “inappropriate disability certification or prescription of controlled substances”; “will follow the treatment plan you recommend.”) Notably, in multivariate analyses, non-white race was the largest predictor of provider mistrust, followed by providers’ number of years in practice and patients’ current drug use, while patients’ reports of opioid analgesic misuse and lifetime alcohol abuse/dependence were not significant predictors.

‘Small Worlds’ as Predictors of General Political Attitudes

In a federal system, do citizens have varying amounts of trust and efficacy for different levels of government? Individuals might, for example, feel a greater sense of efficacy for the more proximate level. This contribution examines 40 years of Canadian Election Study (CES) data to determine whether and how citizens distinguish between levels of government to determine which level of government is deemed more important and whether one is more likely to prompt higher levels of trust and efficacy. After establishing that individuals do indeed hold varying levels of trust and efficacy for provincial and federal governments, the analysis takes advantage of innovative questions in the 1984 CES and makes clear that state and sub-state trust and efficacy exert an independent impact on general political attitudes.

Privacy-preserving P2P data sharing with OneSwarm

Privacy -- the protection of information from unauthorized disclosure -- is increasingly scarce on the Internet. The lack of privacy is particularly true for popular peer-to-peer data sharing applications such as BitTorrent where user behavior is easily monitored by third parties. Anonymizing overlays such as Tor and Freenet can improve user privacy, but only at a cost of substantially reduced performance. Most users are caught in the middle, unwilling to sacrifice either privacy or performance. In this paper, we explore a new design point in this tradeoff between privacy and performance. We describe the design and implementation of a new P2P data sharing protocol, called OneSwarm, that provides users much better privacy than BitTorrent and much better performance than Tor or Freenet. A key aspect of the OneSwarm design is that users have explicit configurable control over the amount of trust they place in peers and in the sharing model for their data: the same data can be shared publicly, anonymously, or with access control, with both trusted and untrusted peers. OneSwarm's novel lookup and transfer techniques yield a median factor of 3.4 improvement in download times relative to Tor and a factor of 6.9 improvement relative to Freenet. OneSwarm is publicly available and has been downloaded by hundreds of thousands of users since its release.

The Right Amount of Trust

A vast literature has investigated the relationship between trust and aggregate economic performance. We investigate the relationship between individual trust and individual economic performance. We find that individual income is hump-shaped in a measure of intensity of trust beliefs available in the European Social Survey. We show that heterogeneity of trust beliefs in the population, coupled with the tendency of individuals to extrapolate beliefs about others from their own level of trustworthiness, could generate the non-monotonic relationship between trust and income. Highly trustworthy individuals think others are like them and tend to form beliefs that are too optimistic, causing them to assume too much social risk, to be cheated more often and ultimately perform less well than those who happen to have a trustworthiness level close to the mean of the population. On the other hand, the low-trustworthiness types form beliefs that are too conservative and thereby avoid being cheated, but give up profitable opportunities too often and, consequently, underperform. Our estimates imply that the cost of either excessive or too little trust is comparable to the income lost by foregoing college. Furthermore, we find that people who trust more are cheated more often by banks as well as when purchasing goods second hand, when relying on the services of a plumber or a mechanic and when buying food. We complement the survey evidence with experimental evidence showing that own trustworthiness and expectations of others' trustworthiness in a trust game are strongly correlated and that performance in the game is hump-shaped.

Trust and creativity: understanding the role of trust in creativity‐oriented joint developments

In this article we report on the design, prototyping and results of a research effort aimed at identifying whether and how trust affects the innovativeness of a partnership between two players. The methodology combined an experiment and two questionnaires. The research aimed to increase our understanding of trust and its impact on the innovative outcome of cooperation and to derive some guidance for economic actors, namely R&D managers and executives who intend to build innovation‐oriented relationships with their business partners. Specifically, we investigated the effect of trust on partners' creativity and willingness to invest financially in a joint development. Our results show that more trustful partners invest higher amounts in the alliance, while there seems to be an optimum amount of mutual trust between partners who maximize their joint creativity and innovativeness; if the level of mutual trust is below or above this threshold, their joint creativity seems to increase less or even to decrease. Our findings suggest that joint development projects should always include explicit trust development activities at the beginning of the project, and that the amount of trust in the joint team should be monitored to avoid the negative consequences of excessive trust.

The Right Amount of Trust

The Right Amount of Trust

Knowledge Sharing In Logistic Networks

The pressure of surviving in the new economy forces organizations to interact onmultiple levels, making supply chains evolve into logistic networks. In order to achieve thehigh performance desired, each member of the partnership must give up the opportunisticbehaviour and share the critical knowledge it posesses for the benefit of the entire network.This implies a certain amount of trust and equity between partner organizations that requiresa significant change in the managerial approach of sharing efforts, information and benefits.

Relationship between Trust and Monitoring

Principal-agent relationship, which is characterised by the absence of legitimate power, necessitates monitoring and control by the principal to align the activities of the agent to the collective goals. However, complete monitoring of the agent is impossible, and expensive. Certain amount of trust is inevitable. This research postulated negative relationship between goodwill trust and control-based monitoring on the one hand and between competence trust and need-based monitoring on the other. The research work used laboratory experiment capturing data from a sample set comprising of executives as well as students of post-graduate management students, both through questionnaires and through a simulation. The study found support to the postulated negative relationships between trust and intended monitoring. However, actual monitoring manifested through allocation of time found rare support for the postulates.

CONTROLLING MODEL TRUST WITH COMPACTLY SUPPORTED SMOOTH RBF

Building models for any kind of complex process is an important tool of today's applied computer science. There are many situations where the trust in the model varies over the input space, and where the amount of trust or confidence should significantly affect the behaviour of the model and the resulting decisions (this applies when the model is used within some decision process, e.g., in a control or optimization task). In this paper, we will focus on special one-sided situations where overestimating the true process is considered critical, while underestimating is tolerable (or conversely). We introduce a new type of radial basis function, the confidence term, with the following properties: (a) it is smooth, i.e., infinitely differentiable and (b) compactly supported. We show how one-sided trust control can be achieved for any kind of model by a simple multiplication with the confidence term. To demonstrate the power and flexibility of our approach, two quite different applications are presented, both of which are practically relevant. One is model-based optimization with constraints, where we have to be careful not to narrow the search space too quickly, until we can trust the constraint model. This requires imposing a low confidence on the constraint model until enough data is available. In the other application, active learning with multiple point queries, we need to achieve the opposite and impose a high value of trust in regions that have been already explored.

Rave reviews?

Rave reviews?

The Downsides of Downsizing

This study explored the impact of downsizing on levels of uncertainty, coworker and management trust, and communicative effectiveness in a health care organization downsizing during a 2-year period from 660 staff to 350 staff members. Self-report data were obtained from employees who were staying (survivors), from employees were being laid off (victims), and from employees with and without managerial responsibilities. Results indicated that downsizing had a similar impact on the amount of trust that survivors and victims had for management. However, victims reported feeling lower levels of trust toward their colleagues compared with survivors. Contrary to expectations, survivors and victims reported similar perceptions of job and organizational uncertainty and similar levels of information received about changes. Employees with no management responsibilities and middle managers both reported lower scores than did senior managers on all aspects of information received. Implications for practice and the management of the communication process are discussed.

The Views of Teachers on Assessment: A Comparison of Lower and Upper Elementary Teachers

This study compared the views and reported practices of lower-grade teachers (kindergarten, 1st, 2nd) and upper-grade teachers (3rd, 4th, 5th) regarding the assessment of children. Teachers (N = 172 lower elementary, N = 126 upper elementary) were surveyed regarding the use and the amount of trust placed in standardized and classroom assessment measures, the factors that influenced their assessment choices, and their beliefs about the role of parents in the assessment process. Teachers in both groups valued and used a variety of assessment measures (e.g., observations, portfolios, written work), but did not value or use scores from mandated standardized tests. Differences among grade levels on the uses of some measures (e.g., checklists, rating scales, paper-and-pencil tests) were observed. Teachers from both groups believed that parents should be involved in the assessment process. The results of this study suggest that many of the classroom assessment practices promoted by the education reform movement are valued by elementary teachers and incorporated in their classrooms.

Adaptive resource utilization and remote access capabilities in high-performance distributed systems: The Open HPC++ approach

Development of high-performance distributed applications, called metaapplications, is extremely challenging because of their complex runtime environment coupled with their requirements of high-performance and Quality of Service (QoS). Such applications typically run on a set of heterogeneous machines with dynamically varying loads, connected by heterogeneous networks possibly supporting a wide variety of communication protocols. In spite of the size and complexity of such applications, they must provide the high-performance and QoS mandated by their users. In order to achieve the goal of high-performance, they need to adaptively utilize their computational and communication resources. Apart from the requirements of adaptive resource utilization, such applications have a third kind of requirement related to remote access QoS. Different clients, although accessing a single server resource, may have differing QoS requirements from their remote connections. A single server resource may also need to provide different QoS for different clients, depending on various issues such as the amount of trust between the server and a given client. These QoS requirements can be encapsulated under the abstraction of remote access capabilities. Metaapplications need to address all the above three requirements in order to achieve the goal of high-performance and satisfy user expectations of QoS. This paper presents Open HPC++, a programming environment for high-performance applications running in a complex and heterogeneous run-time environment. Open HPC++ provides application level tools and mechanisms to satisfy application requirements of adaptive resource utilization and remote access capabilities. Open HPC++ is designed on the lines of CORBA and uses an Object Request Broker (ORB) to support seamless communication between distributed application components. In order to provide adaptive utilization of communication resources, it uses the principle of open implementation to open up the communication mechanisms of its ORB. By virtue of its open architecture, the ORB supports multiple, possibly custom, communication protocols, along with automatic and user controlled protocol selection at run-time. An extension of the same mechanism is used to support the concept of remote access capabilities. In order to support adaptive utilization of computational resources, Open HPC++ also provides a flexible yet powerful set of load-balancing mechanisms that can be used to implement custom load-balancing strategies. The paper also presents performance evaluations of Open HPC++ adaptivity and load-balancing mechanisms.

Complacent and conflicting scientific expertise in British and American drug regulation: clinical risk assessment of triazolam.

This paper presents a case study in the production and interpretation of regulatory science, focusing on the conflicting British and American clinical risk assessments of triazolam (Halcion) - the most controversial sleeping pill in the world. The regulation of triazolam is shown to be more permissive in the USA than in the UK. Six principal socio-political factors are put forward to explain this; differential regulatory trust; regulators' socio-technical data selections; medico-scientific disciplinary influences; organizational and professional interests; conflicts of interest of expert advisers; and the growth of the neo-liberal regulatory state. The risk assessments of both the British and American regulatory agencies are shown to be complacent relative to technical standards which the agencies themselves later accepted. It is suggested that, when the interests of pharmaceutical manufacturers and patients diverge, regulatory assessments are crucially affected by whether regulators are predisposed to award the benefit of the scientific doubts to the manufacturers or patients, and by the balance of such predispositions both within and between regulatory institutions of scientific expertise. The triazolam case indicates that the amount of trust placed in the pharmaceutical industry by the British American regulatory systems may hamper detection of flaws in manufacturers' medical data in a timely manner and, as a consequence, compromise patients' interests. Some policy implications for drug regulation are sketched.

Trust, the voluntary sector and civil society

Looks at the development of the voluntary sector into a semi‐professional area undertaking more work which was previously seen as the State’s responsibility. Considers the amount of trust invested in these charities and the damage that new fundraising techniques may inflict. Outlines the recent political influences on society and the individual together with the resulting attitudes to charity. Briefly outlines the local and global perspectives including mass media communication.

Teams without trust? Investigations in the influence of video-mediated communication on the origin of trust among cooperating persons

Based on a model about the origin of trust among persons, who are meeting for the first time, the influence of video-mediated communication on confidence building was tested. Using a 'between-subjects'-design, two groups were compared, one carrying out a cooperative task face-to-face, the other using a video-conferencing system. Three measurements were taken. Measurement 1 registered the effects of anticipation. One group was instructed to get somebody to know faceto-face, the other group should meet their partner by videoconference. Measurement 2 registered the amount of trust the subjects had developed in their partner during the session. Measurement 3 was the analysis of the interpersonal interaction processes during the conversation. The results are that subjects who anticipated a video-conference showed no difference in mean, but a highly reduced variability in their assessment of their counterpart compared to those subjects who anticipated a meeting face-to-face. A similar pattern was observed for measurement 2. However, no systematically meaningful difference in the behavioural categories of measurement 3 could be found. The results are similar to experiments mostly carried out in the 1970s and 1980s, which had focused on comparisons between face-to-face and mediated communication.

Television, Individualism, and Social Capital

Students of political culture and political theory (Pool 1990; Postman 1985; Merelman 1984, 1989, 1991; Habermas 1975) hypothesize that values associated with individualism have become increasingly prevalent in recent years, with distressing consequences for politics and governance. Putnam (1995), in an article that appeared in these pages, observes that there has been a decline of “social capital” in the United States since 1972 as well, as measured by the number of visits Americans make to family and friends, the number of organizations to which they belong, the amount of trust they report having in other people, and the amount of involvement they report in politics. Ehrenhalt, in his discussion of the tenure of the late Mayor Daley of Chicago, notes that the United States has changed from a society that reveres obedience, authority, order, and a closed political system, to one that reveres freedom, choice, and an open political system.To Americans of the baby-boom generation, authority will always be a word with sinister connotations, calling forth a rush of uncomfortable memories about the schools, churches, and families in which baby-boomers grew up. (1997, 85)It is not only the case that social capital has declined, but political capital, as measured by partisanship and confidence in the institutions of government, has also declined over the past several decades (Luttbeg and Gant 1995). If individualism is a causal factor in the decline of social and political capital, the relationship can be explained by the fact that individualism is by nature loose-bounded (Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky 1990); self-seeking behavior is the norm, as are self-negotiated relationships.