Perceived characteristics of hazard-managing organizations for institutional stereotypes and their effects on trust

Institutional stereotypes’ contents and effects on trust of hazard managers can be determined by directly eliciting ratings of government, business, and nonprofit institutions (‘top-down’ approach), or by a bottom-up approach used here. U.S. residents were recruited in 2015 through an opportunity sample from Amazon Mechanical Turk (n = 752). Americans’ views of positive and negative attributes of 11 organizations each within the institutions of government agencies, corporations, and nonprofit advocacy groups (which try to influence policy) were elicited to test four hypotheses. First, relative positions of organizations within these three institutions on positive and negative attributes converged with these institutions’ relative top-down positions. Second, given great variation in reported familiarity across institutions, organizations, and individuals, familiarity increased distinctions among organizations within an institution while attenuating both positive and negative attributions. Inter-individual differences in demographics, political views, and worldviews produced small variations in positive and negative attributes, supporting their culturally shared (stereotypical) nature. Familiarity did not greatly distinguish ratings per organization of its typicality for its institution, a critical variable for bottom-up identification of stereotypical attributes, but top ‘typical’ organizations for familiar and unfamiliar respondents rarely overlapped. Third, explained variance in trust in ‘typical’ organizations was greatly affected by perceived positive and negative organizational attributes. Fourth, familiarity increased attributes’ effects on trust, probably reflecting influence of both institutional stereotypes and organization-specific beliefs. Low organizational familiarity limited this bottom-up study’s ability to confirm that high-familiarity ‘typical’ organizations and the top-down approach converged on the same stereotypical attributes, but results were not inconsistent with such convergence. Replication with more representative samples, and extending stereotypes research to other cultures, is warranted.