The Trust Paradox: The Role of Context Effects in Stated Trust Judgements

Why do people vote, read newspapers and buy mobile phones when they claim politicians, the press and the mobile phone industry can't be trusted? One account of this apparent paradox argues that people are aware of their ambivalence and only exhibit trust-like behaviours with caution and scepticism. An alternative account suggests we underestimate the impact our implicit trust has on our behaviour when making explicit trust statements. The current research offers a third, not mutually exclusive, explanation. Specifically, it is argued that statements of trust are not simply reflections of some underlying level of trust but are systematically influenced by elicitation context effects. To date, most research has asked people to rate several targets simultaneously (joint evaluation (JE) context) rather than in isolation (separate evaluation (SE) context). It was predicted that this JE approach would encourage contrast effects between targets and lead to a greater spread of trust ratings than using a SE approach thus tending to amplify any stated-revealed trust differences. Evidence was found by comparing trust ratings of various targets with respect to mobile phone technology risks across two studies one using a JE frame and one using a SE frame.