Trust Decision-making Research Articles

The influence of partner trustworthiness and relationship closeness on interpersonal trust in individuals with attachment anxiety: An ERP study

Interpersonal trust (IT) is a combination of individuals’ cognitive evaluations of others’ trustworthiness and affective considerations related to the relationships. Individuals’ trust decisions overly relying on the intimacy of the relationship can be detrimental to their socialization. Attachment styles provide a theoretical framework for explaining individual differences in IT and the balance between cognition control and affective evaluation in social-information processing. However, it remains unclear whether high attachment anxiety (AX) individuals with high interpersonal needs exhibit non-socially adaptive trust decisions, characterized by an over-reliance on relationship closeness (RC), independent of partner trustworthiness (PT). A coin-toss task, combined with event-related potential (ERP), was utilized to explore the performance and temporal characteristics of trust decision-making among individuals with high and low AX under the influence of the two factors. The behavioral results showed that high-AX individuals tended to trust close others regardless of their trustworthiness, while low-AX individuals only trusted close others under low-PT conditions, with no differences in RC for high-PT. The ERP results revealed that high-AX individuals exhibited an enhanced positive P1 by low-trust partners, only discerning differences in RC for high-trust partners (more negative N2 by strangers than friends), reflecting poor conflict-detection abilities confronted with low-trust partners. Low-AX individuals’ neural activity showed higher consistency with their behavioral performance, indicating that trust in close others under low-trust conditions was due to the fewer conflicts elicited and higher expectations of them, reflecting smaller N2 and larger P3. Overall, these findings indicated that high-AX individuals’ IT decision-making was primarily influenced by their reliance on affective evaluation in information processing and weaker cognitive-control abilities, highlighting the contribution of attachment to social-information processing.

Trust or Distrust: The Effect of Facial Emotion and Trustworthy Behavior on Trust Decision-Making.

Based on the model of emotion as social information, this study explores the effects of facial emotions and trustworthy behavior on trust decision-making in trust game through two experiments. The present study used trust game explores the impact of players' facial emotion, arousal and trustworthy behavior on individual trust decision-making through two experiments. The results can be summed up as follows: (1) in the repeated interaction with four players, individuals invest more in trustworthy players than untrustworthy players; (2) individuals invested more in trustworthy players with happy facial emotions, while untrustworthy players with angry facial emotions received less investment. High-arousal facial emotion results in a more extreme investment by the individual; (3) when the players' facial emotion and behavior are inconsistent, the individual will judge according to the player's current behavior, rather than the facial emotion or past behavior.

Modeling Trust Decision-Making of Indonesian Food and Beverage SME Groups in the Adoption of Industry 4.0

This study aimed to model a trust decision-making of Indonesian small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) groups in the adoption of Industry 4.0 namely, ergonomic, machinery, and e-commerce technology. The data on trust and its constraints were collected through a questionnaire, and formulated in a Kansei fitness function. The trust was modeled by Swarm Modeling (SM) to extract critical constraints. Traveling salesman problem-based Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) was used to determine the optimum decision-making path. The simulation indicated that the perception of technology benefit limited the adoption of Industry 4.0. The three optimal trust decision-making paths were generated on Java, Sumatera and Nusa Tenggara groups.

The brain dynamics of trust decisions and outcome evaluation in narcissists.

Individuals with narcissism are, by definition, self-centered, focus on self-benefit, and demonstrate less prosocial behaviors. Trusting strangers is risky, as it can result in exploitation and non-reciprocation. Thus, the trust may be antagonistic to narcissism. However, how narcissists make the choice to trust remains to be elucidated. The current study examined 44 participants (22 rated high in narcissism) playing as trustors in one-shot trust games, and their electroencephalograms were recorded. Individuals high in narcissism exhibited less trust toward strangers, especially following gaining feedback for their trust. In addition, narcissists exhibited a larger N2 following distrust and a stronger negatively-valanced difference in feedback-related negativity (dFRN) after trustee feedback. Our findings provide insights into how individuals with narcissism trust strangers. The results also shed light on the temporal course of brain activity involved in trust decision-making and outcome evaluation in individuals with narcissism.

What are the influencing factors of government’s trust decision-making on private sector in PPP projects: evidence from China?

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is twofold: first, it explores the influencing factors of the government’s trust decision-making in the private sector; second, it explores how these influencing factors affect the government’s trust decisions.Design/methodology/approachA theoretical model was established, and a questionnaire survey was conducted among 152 professionals. The collected datas were analyzed by the structural equation modeling (SEM) method.FindingsThe study identified four critical factors that influence the government’s decision to trust the private sector in public-private-partnership (PPP) projects. All the four factors have a positively correlated impact on the government’s trust decision-making. The structural equation path analysis shows that the most important factor affecting the government’s trust decision-making is the trustee’s (private sector) trustworthy characteristics, and the path coefficient is 0.92. The path coefficients of risk perception and the trustor’s trust tendency are 0.83 and 0.74, respectively. The influence of the legal system environment on government trust decision-making is moderate, with a path coefficient of 0.68.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the literature in two aspects. First, the factors influencing decision-making to government trust in the private sector in PPP projects have been identified. Second, a comprehensive view of the mechanism of government trust in the private sector in PPP projects has been theorized by the SEM method.

Identifying people based on physiognomy: Explanations from cognitive perspective

<p id="p00005">Physiognomy is an important factor in identifying and inferring the individual traits and behaviors. However, its internal mechanism still needs to be further explored. Physiognomy usually refers to individual facial features, mainly including partial features and overall features. The partial features of facial features include the size and shape of the five sense organs, and the thickness of hair, while the overall features of facial features include objective facial width-to-height ratio and subjective facial attractiveness. Based on general cognitive perspective and evolutionary cognitive perspective, then combined with the local and overall features of physiognomy, this paper expounds the process and effect of judging people by physiognomy. <p id="p00008">The general cognitive perspective emphasizes that people study the process of cognition from the perspective of information processing, which emphasizes the process of perception. The individual’s response to physiognomy is mainly a by-product of the brain’s processing of information, which is the processing mechanism for general information. Based on stereotypes, halo effects, status generalization theory, and social information processing theory, scholars use different cognitive processing systems to illustrate the process of getting to know people and their effects. Specifically, local features such as the size and shape of the five sense organs, the thickness of the hair, and overall features such as the facial width-to-height ratio and facial attractiveness can affect individual recognition of traits such as empathy, friendliness, extroversion, self-confidence, narcissism, aggression, dominance and criminological inheritance through different cognitive processing systems. Observers’ subsequent behaviors is based on the individual traits’ information recognized by the physiognomy. On the one hand, people will judge their income, ability, and social level based on the identified individual traits. On the other hand, these individual traits play an important role in the trust decision-making, the recruitment and promotion decision-making process. All in all, physiognomy affects the recognition of individual traits through various cognitive processing systems, and these traits play important roles in judgment (ability, income, social hierarchy) and decision-making (trust, recruitment, promotion). <p id="p00007">Compared with the general cognitive perspective, the evolutionary cognitive perspective emphasizes that in the process of processing information, people will identify which cues are related to health, survival, propagation and adaptation to the environment according to the evolutionary needs. Based on evolutionary theory, evolutionary intrasexual competition theory and the good genes theory, scholars have discussed how to know people and its effect through two different evolutionary selection mechanisms: natural selection and sexual selection. The observer uses the gene as the driving force to identify the observed physiognomy. Observers assessed marital satisfaction, life satisfaction and happiness based on the health and genetic status they identified. In order to meet the needs of evolution and survival, people will choose a mate according to the health and genetic status of the individual identified when observing facial features, combined with the evolutionary law of "survival of the fittest". In conclusion, physiognomy plays an important role in evaluating individual health and genetic status through various evolutionary selection mechanisms, and thus has an important influence on judgment (marriage satisfaction, happiness, life satisfaction) and mate selection decision. <p id="p00006">In addition, the effect of physiognomy on individual life depends on the situations and individual traits. The decision situation of the face viewer, the cultural context of the face owner, and the individual traits of the face viewer and the face owner all influence the effect of physiognomy’s identification. Future research should investigate the interaction among different physiognomy features, and explore the boundary conditions that influence the effect of facial recognition. Furthermore, it is necessary to improve the external validity of the research through big data analysis, and pay more attention to physiognomy features modified by epigenetics on individuals. It is also important to conduct research within the domestic context. In doing so, it will help enrich physiognomy-related research and build a more systematic physiognomy theory.

Trust Decision-Making in Online Social Communities: A Network-Based Model

ABSTRACT The unique characteristics of online social communities call for a reexamination and adaptation of established behavioral theories of trust decision-making. Guided by relevant social science and computational graph theories, we propose a conceptual model of trust decision-making in online social networks. This is the first study that integrates the existing graph-based view of trust decision-making in social networks into socio-psychological theories of trust to provide a richer understanding of trusting decisions in online social networks. We introduce new behavioral antecedents of trusting decisions, and redefine and integrate existing graph-based concepts to develop our proposed conceptual model. We introduce new behavioral antecedents of trusting decisions that have not been identified in previous research. We also identify novel operationalization methods to measure behavioral trust-inducing factors for online social networks. Our empirical findings indicate that both behavioral and network-specific trust decision-making factors should be considered in studying trusting decisions in online social networks.

Catecholaminergic modulation of trust decisions

RationaleTrust is a key component of social interactions. In order to assess the trustworthiness of others, people rely on both information learned from previous encounters, as well as on implicit biases associated with specific facial features.ObjectiveHere, we investigated the role of catecholamine (dopamine and noradrenaline) transmission on trust decisions as a function of both experienced behavior and facial features.MethodsTo increase catecholamine levels, methylphenidate (MPH, i.e., Ritalin®, 20 mg) was administered to participants (N = 24) prior to their playing a well-studied economic task, namely the Trust Game (Berg et al. 1995). We measured the amount of money invested with a variety of game partners. Across game partners, we manipulated two aspects of trust: the facial trust level (high facial trust, low facial trust, and non-social) and the likelihood of reciprocation (high, low).ResultsResults demonstrated no main effect of MPH on investments, but rather a selective lowering of investments under MPH as compared with placebo with the game partners who were low on facial trustworthiness and were low reciprocators.ConclusionThese results provide evidence that MPH administration impacts social trust decision-making, but does so in a context-specific manner.

The impact of trust decision-making on outcome processing: Evidence from brain potentials and neural oscillations

It may be beneficial, although risky, to decide to trust others during social interactions in daily life. The current study explored the time course of the effect of trust decisions on outcome evaluation processing using electroencephalographic (EEG) techniques. Twenty-two healthy young adults made trust or distrust decisions regarding a message they received from a stranger in a card game. The results showed that at the early stage of outcome processing, feedback-related negativity (FRN) was more negative for losses than for gains, and more importantly, this valence effect of FRN was greater for outcomes following trust decisions than distrust decisions. At the later stage, the P3 was larger for gains than for losses and for outcomes following trust decisions than distrust decisions. In addition, at both the early and late stages, differences in the mid-frontal theta power between losses and gains were also greater in the trust condition than in the distrust condition. These findings indicate that trust decisions could effectively modulate the processing of outcome evaluation at different stages. The trust effect at the early stage of outcome processing suggests that compared to distrust decisions, trust decisions result in greater motivation and expectancy to obtain positive outcomes. While the trust effect on the later stage of outcome processing suggests that individuals pay more attention and feel stronger emotional experience to the outcomes following trust decisions. This study sheds light on the neural mechanisms of trust decisions modulating outcome processing.

Category-Based Learning About Deviant Outgroup Members Hinders Performance in Trust Decision Making.

The present research examines whether individuation and categorization processes influence trust decisions about strangers at first and across repeated interactions. In a partial replication of the study reported by Cañadas et al. (2015), participants played an adaptation of the multi-round trust game paradigm and had to decide whether or not to cooperate with unknown partners. Gender (Study 1a) and ethnicity (Studies 1b, 2, and 3) served to create distinct social categories among the game partners, whose reciprocation rates were manipulated at group and individual levels. At the group level, two social groups (i.e., ingroup vs. outgroup) were associated with opposite reciprocation rates (i.e., high vs. low reciprocation rate). At the individual level, consistency was manipulated by altering the reciprocation rate of one out of four members of each social group. That is, there was one inconsistent individual in each group showing a pattern of reciprocation opposite to the group reciprocation rate. Our data, contrary to Cañadas et al.’s (2015) findings, suggested that ingroup partners were individuated given that participants made their decisions to cooperate with the trustees according to their individual reciprocation rate and independently of the group reciprocation rate. In contrast, decisions about outgroup partners (i.e., men in Study 1a and Blacks in Studies 1b, 2, and 3) were affected by category-based thinking. At the same time, in comparison with ingroup, greater cooperation was observed with ethnic outgroups but not with gender outgroups. The consistency of our results with the previous literature on social categorization and across the three experiments seems to indicate they are reliable, supporting the hypothesis that categorization and individuation processes guide trust decision-making, promoting individuation mainly for ingroup and categorization among outgroup members.

How dispositional social risk-seeking promotes trusting strangers: Evidence based on brain potentials and neural oscillations.

Trust is a risky social decision because betrayal may occur. It's not clear how individual differences in social risk-seeking propensity modulate brain processes of trusting strangers. We examined event-related potentials and time-frequency power to investigate this question while 40 participants played the one-shot trust game. Twenty high social risk-seekers (HSR) and 20 low social risk-seekers (LSR) made trusting or distrusting decisions regarding unknown trustees while their electroencephalogram activity was recorded. At the decision-making stage, HSR participants exhibited a larger N2 and increased β power following distrusting decisions than trusting decisions, suggesting greater cognitive control exerted to distrust. By contrast, no such N2 and β differences were found for LSR participants. At the outcome evaluation stage, LSR participants exhibited a more negative-going difference wave between loss feedback-related negativity (FRN) and gain FRN (dFRN) and increased θ power (following losses compared to gains) than did HSR participants, indicating enhanced risk sensitivity of LSR people. Our findings provide insights into the mechanism by which social risk-taking facilitates trusting strangers. The results also shed light on the temporal course of brain activity involved in trust decision-making and outcome evaluation, as well as how individual differences modulate brain dynamics of trusting strangers. (PsycINFO Database Record

Research on Service Reputation Evaluation Method Based on Cloud Model

With the increasingly evident advantages of service-oriented software architecture, Web service received widespread attention, and the numbers of Web Services are increasing constantly. It is more difficult to select high-quality Web service that meets user requirements. Because traditional service reputation evaluation approaches cannot ensure the authenticity and reliability of user ratings, this paper proposes a cloud-based reputation evaluation approach for assessing the history behavior of service consumers, and also takes into account the rating similarity to generate rating quality cloud. With the parameters of cloud model, we can measure the quality level and stability of rankings, which provide additional evidence for trust decision-making. The result of simulating experiments shows that the proposed approach can improve the accuracy of reputation evaluation and the quality of Web service selection, and defend against malicious attacks, so that the interests of service requesters and service providers can be protected.

Examining Trust in Healthcare: a multidisciplinary Perspective

Examining Trust in Healthcare: a multidisciplinary Perspective

Evaluation Approach of Subjective Trust Based on Cloud Model

The trust decision-making is very important to people in Electronic Commerce transactions.The approaches that assist people to finish trust decision-making become a basic issue that researcher must face and solve imminently in the field.A new quantificational subjective trust evaluation approach based on the cloud model is presented.The expected value and hyper entropy of subjective cloud is used to evaluate the reputation of trust objects,and a trust change cloud model is designed to depict the reputation change style of trust objects in order to provide additional evidence.The result of simulating experiments shows the validity and effectiveness of this approach.

A Comprehensive and Adaptive Trust Model for Large-Scale P2P Networks

Based on human psychological cognitive behavior, a Comprehensive and Adaptive Trust (CAT) model for large-scale P2P networks is proposed. Firstly, an adaptive trusted decision-making method based on HEW (Historical Evidences Window) is proposed, which can not only reduce the risk and improve system efficiency, but also solve the trust forecasting problem when the direct evidences are insufficient. Then, direct trust computing method based on IOWA (Induced Ordered Weighted Averaging) operator and feedback trust converging mechanism based on DTT (Direct Trust Tree) are set up, which makes the model have a better scalability than previous studies. At the same time, two new parameters, confidence factor and feedback factor, are introduced to assign the weights to direct trust and feedback trust adaptively, which overcomes the shortage of traditional method, in which the weights are assigned by subjective ways. Simulation results show that, compared to the existing approaches, the proposed model has remarkable enhancements in the accuracy of trust decision-making and has a better dynamic adaptation capability in handling various dynamic behaviors of peers.

An Evaluation Approach of Subjective Trust Based on Cloud Model

As online trade and interactions on the internet are on the rise, a key issue is how to use simple and effective evaluation methods to accomplish trust decision-making for customers. It is well known that subjective trust holds uncertainty like randomness and fuzziness. However, existing approaches which are commonly based on probability or fuzzy set theory can not attach enough importance to uncertainty. To remedy this problem, a new quantifiable subjective trust evaluation approach is proposed based on the cloud model. Subjective trust is modeled with cloud model in the evaluation approach, and expected value and hyper-entropy of the subjective cloud is used to evaluate the reputation of trust objects. Our experimental data shows that the method can effectively support subjective trust decisions and provide a helpful exploitation for subjective trust evaluation.