Trust Question Research Articles

Measuring community sustainability: exploring the intersection of the built environment & social capital with a participatory case study

Municipalities all over the globe seek to evaluate the sustainability of their communities and this process requires an interdisciplinary perspective. Walkability and social capital are important measures of sustainable communities that are not necessarily considered together in measurement schemes. Through a community-based case study, the following article examines the relationship between select measures of social capital and self-perceived walkability. Descriptive statistics demonstrated that higher levels of social capital existed in more walkable communities. More sophisticated analysis further supported this association. A community index was created from responses to questions about participating in civic engagement activities such as donating blood, attending a committee meeting or public hearing, interacting with individuals in various neighborhoods, and contributing to a community project. A trust index was also created with answers to survey questions about general trust and trust of neighbors and other members of communities. Multilevel models demonstrated that higher levels of walkability were associated with higher levels of participation in community activities, even after controlling for socio-demographic factors. Similar patterns were found for the trust index where higher levels of walkability were positively associated with positive responses to a variety of trust questions. Implications for sustainable communities policy and management are suggested.

Do Germans Support the Euro?

This paper analyses public support for the euro in Germany. Drawing from the results of regular Eurobarometer surveys, it finds that the ongoing financial and sovereign debt crisis has reduced support for the euro among German citizens, but not dramatically so - at least not yet. In the 1990s, the German public was sceptical towards the euro. But since the introduction of euro banknotes and coins, a clear majority of citizens supports the euro - despite the financial and sovereign debt crisis. Moreover, on average, support for the euro is at a similar level in Germany as it is elsewhere in the euro area. This salient finding, however, appears to contradict the results of a survey conducted by the Allensbach Institute, an influential public opinion polling centre in Germany, which concludes that an overwhelming majority of Germans do not trust the euro any more. We suggest that this striking difference in findings could be due to three factors: a) the fact that the Allensbach Institute and Eurobarometer were measuring different concepts: trust in the euro and support for the euro, respectively; b) the Allensbach Institute's results might be biased, given the scaling of their trust question and c) the fact that Eurobarometer frames its survey questions explicitly in a European context, whereas the Allensbach surveys have a purely national context.

How Much Should We Trust the World Values Survey Trust Question?

We use a unique data set of trust game replications in order to validate the commonly used “trust” question from the World Values Survey. We find that trust as measured by the World Values Survey is positively correlated with experimentally measured trust and unrelated to experimentally measured trustworthiness.

How General Is Trust in “Most People”? Solving the Radius of Trust Problem

Generalized trust has become a paramount topic throughout the social sciences, in its own right and as the key civic component of social capital. To date, cross-national research relies on the standard question: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?” Yet the radius problem—that is, how wide a circle of others respondents imagine as “most people”—makes comparisons between individuals and countries problematic. Until now, much about the radius problem has been speculation, but data for 51 countries from the latest World Values Survey make it possible to estimate how wide the trust radius actually is. We do this by relating responses to the standard trust question to a new battery of items that measures in-group and out-group trust. In 41 out of 51 countries, “most people” in the standard question predominantly connotes out-groups. To this extent, it is a valid measure of general trust in others. Nevertheless, the radius of “most people” varies considerably across countries; it is substantially narrower in Confucian countries and wider in wealthy countries. Some country rankings on trust thus change dramatically when the standard question is replaced by a radius-adjusted trust score. In cross-country regressions, the radius of trust matters for civic attitudes and behaviors because the assumed civic nature of trust depends on a wide radius.

Does social trust at school affect students’ smoking and drinking behavior in Japan?

This study examined the individual and contextual effects of cognitive social capital at school on cigarette smoking and alcohol drinking in Japanese high school students. Self-administered questionnaires were distributed to 3248 students in grades 10-12 (aged 15-18 years) at 29 public high schools across Okinawa, Japan in 2008. The individual-level cognitive social capital studied was generalized trust. Using multi-level logistic regression models, the effects of individual- and contextual-level cognitive social capital on smoking and drinking were analyzed. Contextual-level cognitive social capital was measured on the basis of aggregated individual responses to the trust question at school level. After adjustment for the covariates, individual-level trust was negatively associated with smoking and drinking among boys and girls. Similarly, after adjustment for the covariates, school-level trust showed an inverse association with smoking for girls. A similar but not statistically significant association was observed for boys. On the other hand, school-level trust was not associated with drinking among boys or girls. After adjustment for individual-level trust and the covariates, these findings were in the same direction, but the school-level trust for girls no longer had a significant contextual effect on smoking. The findings suggest evidence of the individual effect of cognitive social capital on adolescents' smoking and drinking, and that the contextual effect of social capital on smoking was inconclusive. In addition, no association of contextual-level social capital with drinking was observed.

Assessing the Validity of Generalized Trust Questions: What Kind of Trust are we Measuring?

In the social capital literature a distinction is made between trust expressed in in general, and trust in who are known to us personally. In this article we investigate the frames of reference respondents make use of when answering two commonly used interpersonal trust questions. Half of our sample was administered a version which asks respondents whether most can be trusted. The other half of the sample was administered an alternative version of the question, in which the object of trust is restricted to people in your local area. Immediately after answering the trust question all respondents were asked to report, in their own words, who came to mind when formulating their response. Counter to the widespread assumption that these questions measure generalized trust, we find that a substantial number of respondents report having thought about who are known to them personally. Furthermore, respondents who report having thought about individuals who are known to them also report substantially higher levels of trust than who say they thought about abstract categories such as people in general. Our results suggest that apparent differences in trust across question formats and groups within the general public derive, at least in part, from heterogeneity in question interpretation.

Microfoundations of Social Capital

We show that the standard trust question routinely used in social capital research is importantly related to cooperation behavior and we provide a microfoundation for this relation. We run a large-scale public goods experiment over the internet in Denmark and find that the trust question is a proxy for cooperation preferences rather than beliefs about others’ cooperation. To disentangle the preference and belief channels, we run a (standard) public goods game in which beliefs matter for cooperation choices and one (using the strategy method) in which they do not matter. We show that the “fairness question”, a recently proposed alternative to the “trust question”, is also related to cooperation behavior but operates through beliefs rather than preferences.

Measuring Trust: Experiments and Surveys in Contrast and Combination

Trust is a concept that has attracted - significant attention in economic theory and research within the last two decades: it has been applied in a number of contexts and has been investigated both as an explanatory and as a dependent variable. In this paper, we explore the questions of what exactly is measured by the diverse survey-derived scales and experiments claiming to measure trust, and how these different measures are related. Using nationally representative data, we test a commonly used experimental measure of trust for robustness to a number of interferences, finding it to be mostly unsusceptible to stake size, the extent of strategy space, the use of the strategy method, and the characteristics of the experimenters. Inspired by criticism of the widespread trust question used in many surveys, we created a new, improved survey trust scale consisting of three short statements. We show that the dimension of this scale is distinct from trust in institutions and trust in known others. Our new scale is a valid and reliable measure of trust in strangers. The scale is valid in the sense that it correlates with trusting behaviour in the experiment. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the test-retest reliability of six weeks is high. The experimental measure of trust is, on the other hand, not significantly correlated with trust in institutions nor with trust in known others. We therefore conclude that the experimental measure of trust refers not to trust in a general sense, but specifically to trust in strangers.

Trust and Control at the Workplace: Evidence from Representative Samples of Employees in Europe

Based on two representative samples of employees, the German Socio Economic Panel and the European Social Survey, we explore the relation between certain measures of control in employment relationships (i.e. working time regulations, use of performance appraisal systems, monitoring by supervisors, autonomy to organize the work) and individuals’ inclination to trust others. Trust is measured by the general trust question like in most other economic studies based on surveys. We find that strict working time regulations, monitoring and lack of autonomy – all indicators for control at the workplace – are negatively related to trust. Moreover, we contribute to the literature on trust by gathering hints to other potential determinants of trust.

Measuring Trust: Experiments and Surveys in Contrast and Combination

Trust is a concept that has attracted - significant attention in economic theory and research within the last two decades: it has been applied in a number of contexts and has been investigated both as an explanatory and as a dependent variable. In this paper, we explore the questions of what exactly is measured by the diverse survey-derived scales and experiments claiming to measure trust, and how these different measures are related. Using nationally representative data, we test a commonly used experimental measure of trust for robustness to a number of interferences, finding it to be mostly unsusceptible to stake size, the extent of strategy space, the use of the strategy method, and the characteristics of the experimenters. Inspired by criticism of the widespread trust question used in many surveys, we created a new, improved survey trust scale consisting of three short statements. We show that the dimension of this scale is distinct from trust in institutions and trust in known others. Our new scale is a valid and reliable measure of trust in strangers. The scale is valid in the sense that it correlates with trusting behaviour in the experiment. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the test-retest reliability of six weeks is high. The experimental measure of trust is, on the other hand, not significantly correlated with trust in institutions nor with trust in known others. We therefore conclude that the experimental measure of trust refers not to trust in a general sense, but specifically to trust in strangers.

Are Blacks Really Less Trusting than Whites? Revisiting the Race and Trust Question

Many scholars have concluded that blacks are less trusting than whites. The research presented here calls that conclusion into question. Previous research has been based on the standard trust measure, which may not be well suited to understanding how trust varies with social categories such as race. Building on theories of self-categorization and social identity, we argue that blacks are not less trusting than whites as suggested in previous work. Instead trust is expected to be greater within race-category boundaries than across race-category boundaries. A new experiment designed to test this argument is employed. The results strongly support our predictions. This research also addresses how trustworthiness varies with race-category. Results for trustworthiness do not map on to those for trust. Instead, blacks in this research show a higher level of trustworthiness than whites, regardless of other's race-category.

Politics, State Building, and the Courts, 1870-1920

As the last federal troops departed the South in the late 1870s, hundreds were sent west to repress a strike by the workers on Jay Gould’s newly consolidated railway lines. The “Southern question,” a Virginia newspaper observed, had been put to rest. Now, the “trust question” and “the relation of labor and capital” would dominate the nation’s politics. The dislocations and discontent produced by new national corporations, national markets, and burgeoning industrial centers brought forth a welter of new legislative responses and new uses of state power, including experiments in administrative state-building at both state and national levels. Not only nation-spanning railroads and manufacturing firms but also mass immigration from abroad and increasingly bitter inequalities and class conflict at home presented new challenges that made America’s pre-Civil War traditions of local self-government and Jacksonian laissez-faire seem inadequate and antiquated. When Europeans spoke of the “statelessness” of nineteenth-century America, they had in mind the absence of a powerful central administration and of a national “state elite” to run it. “Administration” and “bureaucracy” were foreign-sounding terms. They seemed antithetical to the American system of government, which had been born in revolt against just such a modern state. Instead, antebellum America possessed a small, unassuming national government, which left most tasks to state lawmakers, local officials, and the courts. The leaders of bar and bench were, in Tocqueville’s famous phrase, America’s “high political class”; they were the rough equivalent of Europe’s administrative state elites. Common law judges hammered out and administered a remarkable portion of the important rules of social and economic life.

Tropic Trust Versus Nordic Trust: Experimental Evidence from Tanzania and Sweden

Undergraduates in Tanzania and Sweden participated in one Trust game, one Dictator game, and answered a standard set of survey questions relating to trust. In both countries we detected a strong and significant relation between Dictator donations and proportions returned in Trust games, indicating that unconditional distribution preferences matter in Trust game behaviour. In Sweden incentive compatible evaluations of unrevealed Dictator donations significantly predicted the amount sent in Trust games. The predictive power of survey trust questions differed between countries: a plausible relation between survey trust and trust behaviour was found in Sweden but not in Tanzania.

Providing incentives in providerless networks

This paper explores the extension of a model for the operation of an ad hoc mobile network to more general providerless networks, such as peer-to-peer systems. The model incorporates incentives for users to act as transit nodes on multi-hop paths and to be rewarded with their own ability to send traffic. The paper explores some of the trust questions that arise in this problem space and conjectures that the very structure of a peer organisation may have some hidden benefits for trust re-enforcement, that have not been previously explored (to our knowledge).

The Multiple Dimensions of Trust in Resident/Police Relations in Boston

What is it about resident/police relations in poor urban communities that results in many community members' deep distrust in police? This question is addressed by applying a framework of the “four trust questions” to analyze the complexities of community members' perceptions of police and police action aimed at reducing youth violence in Boston's high-crime neighborhoods. To differentiate residents' multiple—and sometimes conflicting—expectations of police, trust is broken down into four questions about priorities, competence, dependability, and respectfulness. Based on more than 50 qualitative interviews with community members, findings reveal that many residents considered the police to meet their expectations of competence and dependability but not of shared priorities or respect. Respect, in particular, was important to residents, although they recognized a tension between police acting competently and respectfully.

Stock Returns, Real Activity, and the Trust Question

Stock Returns, Real Activity, and the Trust Question

Stock Returns, Real Activity, and the Trust Question

ABSTRACTPeriodic antitrust attacks on corporations may have influenced stock prices. For the period 1904 to 1944, each antitrust case filed is associated with a 0.5 to 1.9 percent drop of the Dow, and each unexpected case with even larger drops. Other aspects of antitrust besides actual filings may help account for other movements, in particular the 1929 Crash. Historical evidence bears on the question of whether antitrust is exogenous and also links antitrust and the “corporation problem.” These results illustrate the sorts of real factors aside from changes in concurrent output that may account for stock price volatility.

Race and Trust in Government: Testing the Political Reality Model

Race and Trust in Government: Testing the Political Reality Model

On the Meaning of Political Trust: New Evidence from Items Introduced in 1978

In 1978, the University of Michigan Center for Political Studies introduced four new political trust questions that, more than the standard trust items used over the course of two decades, have specific referents-President Carter, the Carter administration, and the U.S. Congress. These four new questions, apart from their changed objects of reference, use the same wording as two of the older trust items. Thus, observed correlations between the new items and old items may reflect both substantive conceptual associations among the various political referents and associations resulting from overlapping methods variance, i.e., from the mere similarity of question wording. We find that there are problems caused by similar question wording and demonstrate that analyses of the new items will not offer any easy solution to the problem of interpreting the standard political trust index.

The Origins of Antitrust Policy

H ANS B. THORELLI' S The Federal Antitrust Policy will establish him as one of those untiring researchers who believe that the proper way to study a subject is to burrow through every known source and if possible to discover several new ones. Following this canon, Thorelli has thoroughly examined the materials on the history of the Sherman Antitrust Law before 1903. He has read all the English common-law cases on monopoly and restraints of trade; all the congressional debates on the Sherman Act between 1888 and 1903, and all the party declarations and presidential addresses; all the Department of Justice files on antitrust cases; and all the judicial opinions. He has read surprisingly much of the periodical literature on the trust question and of the secondary materials on related problems in political, economic, and intellectual history. He is not the first to have used these materials, or even the first, as Corwin Edwards claims in a flattering foreword, to have used the Department of Justice archives-they had been exploited earlier at least by Cummings and McFarland and by Walton Hamilton and Irene Till. Nevertheless, he is the first to have done all this so comprehensively, and, since he quotes at very great length from very many documents, his work will be an invaluable sourcebook for future scholars. But it is a compendium that must be used with extreme caution. The attempt to set down all the facts, or as many as possible, has at times led Thorelli to treat as facts what are at best broad guesses or vaguely remembered rumors. He states, on the authority of Allan Nevins, that AttorneyGeneral Olney let the E. C. Knight case go