Trust Decisions Research Articles

Unpacking news consumption and trust decisions through a folk theory approach: A study of Austrian young adults

Unpacking news consumption and trust decisions through a folk theory approach: A study of Austrian young adults

“It’s a Battle You Can’t Win”: Domination and Class Differences in Real-World Trust among Black Families

How does class affect one’s propensity to trust? Previous research finds higher-status actors express less trust than lower-status actors in interpersonal and institutional contexts. Scholars explain this finding as an outcome of structural dependence—when people have few alternative means for accessing valuable resources. In contrast, I find dependence inadequate to explain the relationship I observe between class and institutional trust among black families whose children were recommended for special education and other remedial program placement in an affluent, predominantly white school district. Drawing on retrospective interviews from a community ethnography, findings show that real-world trust decision processes also involve domination. Empirical studies of trust have overlooked the ways trustees—those being given trust—exercise power to achieve deference in trust exchanges, and how trustors—those placing trust in others—deploy their power to withstand trustees’ influence. I argue that trust might best be conceptualized as a two-part decision process, because class and other status resources affect trustors’ freedom to choose at two key junctures: (1) in weighing options and costs of trust errors, and (2) in communicating distrust in face-to-face interactions, where the potential for domination is high. Focusing on intersecting systems of power in authentic trust exchanges, this study shows how middle-class black trustors use symbolic resources to “go up against” the institutional power of educational experts and refuse placement, whereas working-class trustors consent to placement.

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.

To Authenticity, and Beyond! Building Safe and Fair Generative AI Upon the Three Pillars of Provenance.

Provenance facts, such as who made an image and how, can provide valuable context for users to make trust decisions about visual content. Against a backdrop of inexorable progress in generative AI for computer graphics, over two billion people will vote in public elections this year. Emerging standards and provenance enhancing tools promise to play an important role in fighting fake news and the spread of misinformation. In this article, we contrast three provenance enhancing technologies-metadata, fingerprinting, and watermarking-and discuss how we can build upon the complementary strengths of these three pillars to provide robust trust signals to support stories told by real and generative images. Beyond authenticity, we describe how provenance can also underpin new models for value creation in the age of generative AI. In doing so, we address other risks arising with generative AI such as ensuring training consent, and the proper attribution of credit to creatives who contribute their work to train generative models. We show that provenance may be combined with distributed ledger technology to develop novel solutions for recognizing and rewarding creative endeavor in the age of generative AI.

Revisiting the effect of trustworthy face and attractive appearance on trust and trustworthiness behavior

ABSTRACT In a trust game experiment with Chinese participants, we investigate the effects of trustworthy faces and attractive appearances on trust and trustworthiness behaviour. The participants played the role of trustor and made decisions on how much money to transfer to their paired trustees while looking at the trustees’ photos presented on a large screen. After that, the trustees decided how much money to return to their paired trustors. Results indicate that trust decisions are influenced by both a trustworthy face and an attractive appearance. In addition, a gender effect on trust decisions was found. Men are more trusting than women are, regardless of whether their counterparts are male or female. However, females are less likely to trust their male counterparts than female counterparts. Finally, it is observed that the trustees with a more attractive appearance are more likely to betray the trust they have, while this is not the case for those with more trustworthy faces.

Developmental trajectory of children’s epistemic and interpersonal trust decision for acting and testifying informants

ABSTRACT The purpose of the study is to examine children’s (5-to 10-year-old) epistemic and interpersonal trust decisions when they watched testifying and acting informants. Epistemic and interpersonal trust decision data were gathered from separate groups. Children in epistemic trust study responded to three ask questions. Children in interpersonal trust study responded to three interpersonal trust questions. Epistemic trust findings showed that children preferred testifying informant significantly higher than acting informant, children’s families’ SES and age did not affect their preference. For epistemic trust, girls preferred testimony informant significantly higher than acting informant. Interpersonal trust findings revealed that children preferred testifying informant significantly higher than acting informant. For interpersonal trust fourth graders (10 year-olds) preferred acting informant significantly more than other groups. The study suggests that as age increases children started to consider acting as a more important source of evidence than testimony for evaluating trustworthiness of person’s for interpersonal trust decisions.

Can you trust Wikidata?

In order to use a value retrieved from a Knowledge Graph (KG) for some computation, the user should, in principle, ensure that s/he trusts the veracity of the claim, i.e., considers the statement as a fact. Crowd-sourced KGs, or KGs constructed by integrating several different information sources of varying quality, must be used via a trust layer. The veracity of each claim in the underlying KG should be evaluated, considering what is relevant to carrying out some action that motivates the information seeking. The present work aims to assess how well Wikidata (WD) supports the trust decision process implied when using its data. WD provides several mechanisms that can support this trust decision, and our KG Profiling, based on WD claims and schema, elaborates an analysis of how multiple points of view, controversies, and potentially incomplete or incongruent content are presented and represented.

Measuring an artificial intelligence language model’s trust in humans using machine incentives

Will advanced artificial intelligence (AI) language models exhibit trust toward humans? Gauging an AI model’s trust in humans is challenging because—absent costs for dishonesty—models might respond falsely about trusting humans. Accordingly, we devise a method for incentivizing machine decisions without altering an AI model’s underlying algorithms or goal orientation and we employ the method in trust games between an AI model from OpenAI and a human experimenter (namely, author TJ). We find that the AI model exhibits behavior consistent with trust in humans at higher rates when facing actual incentives than when making hypothetical decisions—a finding that is robust to prompt phrasing and the method of game play. Furthermore, trust decisions appear unrelated to the magnitude of stakes and additional experiments indicate that they do not reflect a non-social preference for uncertainty.

Factors affecting hesitancy toward COVID-19 vaccine booster doses in Canada: a cross-national survey

ObjectiveCOVID-19 transmission, emergence of variants of concern, and weakened immunity have led to recommended vaccine booster doses for COVID-19. Vaccine hesitancy challenges broad immunization coverage. We deployed a cross-national survey to investigate knowledge, beliefs, and behaviours toward continued COVID-19 vaccination.MethodsWe administered a national, cross-sectional online survey among adults in Canada between March 16 and March 26, 2022. We utilized descriptive statistics to summarize our sample, and tested for demographic differences, perceptions of vaccine effectiveness, recommended doses, and trust in decisions, using the Rao-Scott correction for weighted chi-squared tests. Multivariable logistic regression was adjusted for relevant covariates to identify sociodemographic factors and beliefs associated with vaccine hesitancy.ResultsWe collected 2202 completed questionnaires. Lower education status (high school: odds ratio (OR) 1.90, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.29, 2.81) and having children (OR 1.89, CI 1.39, 2.57) were associated with increased odds of experiencing hesitancy toward a booster dose, while higher income ($100,000–$149,999: OR 0.60, CI 0.39, 0.91; $150,000 or more: OR 0.49, CI 0.29, 0.82) was associated with decreased odds. Disbelief in vaccine effectiveness (against infection: OR 3.69, CI 1.98, 6.90; serious illness: OR 3.15, CI 1.69, 5.86), disagreeing with government decision-making (somewhat disagree: OR 2.70, CI 1.38, 5.29; strongly disagree: OR 4.62, CI 2.20, 9.7), and beliefs in over-vaccinating (OR 2.07, CI 1.53, 2.80) were found associated with booster dose hesitancy.ConclusionCOVID-19 vaccine hesitancy may develop or increase regarding subsequent vaccines. Our findings indicate factors to consider when targeting vaccine-hesitant populations.

How electronic word of mouth (eWOM) shapes consumer social media shopping

PurposeThis study aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion of how consumers approach shopping directly via social media by explicating decisions related to trust on social media and how various types of electronic word of mouth (eWOM; ratings and reviews, recommendations and referrals and social media communities) contribute to these decisions.Design/methodology/approachA total of 198 respondents with experience shopping directly via social media were instructed to select the platform on which they had the most shopping experience (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, etc.) to answer relevant survey questions. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used for analyzing the results.FindingsFindings reveal that eWOM provided by strong ties (recommendations and referrals; social media communities) is superior to weak ties (ratings and reviews). Surprisingly, ratings and reviews do not significantly relate to trust in the retailer, suggesting that this information may be necessary but not sufficient for trusting retailers on social media.Originality/valueThis research distinguishes trust decisions related to shopping on social media and clarifies how each type of eWOM uniquely influences trust in the retailer by using tie strength theory.

In platform we trust: How interchangeability affects trust decisions in collaborative consumption

Collaborative consumption describes exchanges among individuals mediated by an internet platform. This study examines the conditions under which individuals are likely to make a trust decisions in a complex triadic relationship involving a seller, a digital platform and a buyer. Building on relevant research, we propose that the interchangeability of buyers (e.g., where a buyer has been a seller) has an effect on their trust decisions because it leads them to engage in other-focused perspective taking. Through a quantitative study (N = 908), this research reveals the moderating effects of interchangeability. For noninterchangeable buyers (buyers who do not have experience as sellers), trust decisions are based on reputational cues (platform and seller reputation) and credibility trusting beliefs. For interchangeable buyers, trust decisions are primarily based on credibility and benevolence trusting beliefs rather than reputational cues. The findings also indicate that for both parties, there is a hierarchy of trust or a transfer effect from trust in the platform to trust in the sharing partner. Accordingly, we contribute to the literature on trust by examining hierarchical trust in terms of consumer-to-consumer platforms, identifying the significant role of interchangeability and revealing that other-focused perspective taking is a key mechanism in trust decisions.

Do Action Speaks Louder Than Words? Young Children’s Selective Trust Decisions

Do Action Speaks Louder Than Words? Young Children’s Selective Trust Decisions

Trust-Preserving Mechanism for Blockchain Assisted Mobile Crowdsensing

Blockchain is envisioned as one of the promising technologies to address trust concern brought by mobile crowdsensing (MCS), due to its auditability, immutability and decentralization. Nevertheless, blockchain cannot fundamentally guarantee that the valuable sensed data outside the chain can enter the chain, although data integrity and consistency can be ensured once it is confirmed inside the chain. In addition, simply applying blockchain in MCS while ignoring possible abnormal saboteurs hidden in numerous devices may mislead the normal operation of blockchain, resulting in untrustworthy interactions. Consequently, it is highly desirable to build a trust-preserving mechanism (TPM) to fully enjoy the benefits of using blockchain in MCS. To this end, we first resort to a probabilistic trust assessment inferred from the interaction outcomes in blockchain, to incentivize participants to maintain the trustworthiness of interactions. By inferring trust to aid decision-making, trust decision is further made, including leader election and transaction data generation, to filter untrusted nodes from participating in blockchain process. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of TPM, and improve the performance in terms of contribution rate, consensus accuracy and system stability.

The role of religiosity in the trust decisions of adolescents and young adults

ABSTRACT This study investigated whether youth essentialize religiosity considering religious informants as more trustworthy. Participants (N = 181) from three age groups (preadolescents, early adolescents and young adults) were presented with vignettes and asked which informant the protagonist should trust. One protagonist was introduced as religious. Results showed that youth’s essentialism for religiosity is limited, but those with proximity to religion preferred advice from a Priest over an expert. This suggests that youth’s essentialism for the trustworthiness of religiosity may be limited to religious leaders and is present only among those close to religion. Participants also tended to trust the expert rather than the Priest and the informant whose advice aligned with their own preferences.

Climates of Distrust in Medicine.

Trust in medicine is often conceived of on an individual level, with respect to how people rely on particular clinicians or institutions. Yet as discussions of trust during the Covid-19 pandemic highlighted, trust decisions are not always as individual or interpersonal as this conception suggests. Rather, individual instances of trusting behavior are related to social trust, which is conceived as a willingness to be vulnerable to people in general, based on a sense of shared norms. In this essay, I propose that individual and social trust are connected to each other in what can be termed a "climate of trust." I explain how masking trends during the pandemic facilitated a "climate of distrust," and I consider the role that clinicians might play in transforming climates of distrust into climates of trust.

Trust, lies, and inequality

AbstractThe effect of endowment equality on trust may stem from outcome inequality aversion or changes in expected trustworthiness. Here, we measure trust as the expectation of honesty in a sender‐receiver game, where participants must make trust decisions without knowing the outcome. Our design enables us to isolate the effect of initial endowment inequality on trust. Our results show that endowment inequality reduces trust regardless of whether it favors the sender or the receiver. We further find that the frequency of lies is insensitive to endowment inequality. Our results amplify the importance of equal starting positions in promoting trust.

962 Are We Right to Continue to Omit Antibiotic Prophylaxis in Trans-Perineal Prostate Biopsies? A Clinical Audit in a Single NHS Trust

Abstract Introduction Transperineal Prostate Biopsies (TPPB) offer lower rates of infection-related complications than Transrectal Prostate Biopsies (TRPB), with post-procedural sepsis rates reported between 0.5% and 3%. The intuitive evolution from TRPB to TPPB has, however, involved the use of routine antibiotic prophylaxis, but studies have shown that there may be no difference in infection rates post procedure in patients with and without antibiotics. Aim This audit aimed to assess infection-related complications in patients undergoing TPPB without antibiotic prophylaxis in a single NHS Trust, following the Trust decision to discontinue antibiotic use. Method Retrospective analysis of 200 patients that had been biopsied between April 2022 and October 2022 was performed. 28-day post procedure hospitalisation and sepsis rates were assessed, in addition to 28-day GP presentations, antibiotic prescriptions and relevant co-morbidities. Results The cohort had a mean age of 70.1 years. The most common co-morbidities included Hypertension and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus. 1 patient presented to hospital with sepsis within 28 days, representing a post-procedure infection rate of 0.5%. This patient received IV antibiotics in hospital and was discharged after 3 days. No patients presented to their GP within 28 days post procedure or were prescribed antibiotics in the community. Conclusions Given the low post procedure infection rates, we believe the evidence provided in this audit further supports and justifies the discontinuation of routine prophylactic antibiotics in patients undergoing TPPB. We believe this to be relevant in a world where antibiotic stewardship is becoming an ever more important issue.

Application of artificial intelligence: risk perception and trust in the work context with different impact levels and task types

Following the studies of Araujo et al. (AI Soc 35:611–623, 2020) and Lee (Big Data Soc 5:1–16, 2018), this empirical study uses two scenario-based online experiments. The sample consists of 221 subjects from Germany, differing in both age and gender. The original studies are not replicated one-to-one. New scenarios are constructed as realistically as possible and focused on everyday work situations. They are based on the AI acceptance model of Scheuer (Grundlagen intelligenter KI-Assistenten und deren vertrauensvolle Nutzung. Springer, Wiesbaden, 2020) and are extended by individual descriptive elements of AI systems in comparison to the original studies. The first online experiment examines decisions made by artificial intelligence with varying degrees of impact. In the high-impact scenario, applicants are automatically selected for a job and immediately received an employment contract. In the low-impact scenario, three applicants are automatically invited for another interview. In addition, the relationship between age and risk perception is investigated. The second online experiment tests subjects’ perceived trust in decisions made by artificial intelligence, either semi-automatically through the assistance of human experts or fully automatically in comparison. Two task types are distinguished. The task type that requires “human skills”—represented as a performance evaluation situation—and the task type that requires “mechanical skills”—represented as a work distribution situation. In addition, the extent of negative emotions in automated decisions is investigated. The results are related to the findings of Araujo et al. (AI Soc 35:611–623, 2020) and Lee (Big Data Soc 5:1–16, 2018). Implications for further research activities and practical relevance are discussed.

Crime-related exposure to violence and prosocial behavior: Experimental evidence from Colombia

Victims of violence appear hypersensitive to cues and their brain reacts to triggers as if the past events were happening in the present. We assess to what extent recalling these negative experiences increases prosociality. We conduct two artefactual field experiments in Bogotá (Colombia) to test this hypothesis. Our methodological strategy is to experimentally manipulate the recall of violence, either through a direct question or through a monetary loss in participants’ experimental endowment. We interact these treatments with the degree of exposure to violence. We find that victims recalling experiences of urban violence act more prosocially in terms of trust, trustworthiness, and cooperation. The increase in prosociality favors residents in the same city district as the participant (ingroup bias). However, the ingroup bias holds in trust decisions but not in cooperation games decisions.

Examining trust between supervisors and trainees in the pediatric emergency department.

Lack of trust between supervisors and trainees can have harmful consequences. Trust has been examined between physicians, patients, and staff in multiple settings but has not been examined in a bidirectional manner in the pediatric emergency department (PED). Debra Meyerson in 1996 discussed the theory of swift trust, a type of trust that develops quickly between temporary groups through reliance on categories. Meyerson describes categories as groups unified by social identities such as gender or profession. We explored the applicability of swift trust in the relationship between supervisors and trainees in the PED. This multimethods study used qualitative interviews and the validated interpersonal mistrust trust measure (IMTM) to assess baseline trusting style. PED attendings from a single institution and residents from various training levels, specialties, and institutions rotating through the same PED were sampled until thematic saturation was reached. Interviews were analyzed using directed content analysis. IMTM scores were triangulated with interviewee's reported trusting styles. Seventeen PED attendings and 16 residents participated. Residents and attendings emphasized different factors that influence trust. Common factors across groups included affect, the need for vulnerability, and appropriate communication. Most described reliance on certain categories (level of training, specialty, etc.) when making trusting decisions. Categories such as gender and race were noted to be unimportant when making trusting decisions about others, although some participants believed these attributes played into decisions made by others. Quantitative data from the IMTM supported qualitative conclusions regarding trusting style. The trusting relationship between supervisors and trainees in the PED dovetails with the swift trust theory. Common factors that influence trust reveal entry points for attendings and residents to improve trust and ultimately prevent negative patient outcomes. Future studies may examine how reliance on categories influences an individual's trust in their colleagues.