Search results

Abstract Children rely extensively on others' testimony to learn about the world. However, they are not uniformly credulous toward other people. From an early age, children's reliance on testimony is tempered by selective trust in particular informants. Three‐ and 4‐year‐olds monitor the accuracy or knowledge of informants, including those that are familiar. They prefer to seek and endorse information provided by someone who has proved accurate in the past rather than someone who has made mistakes or acknowledged ignorance. Future research is likely to pinpoint other heuristics that children use to filter incoming testimony and may reveal more generalized patterns of trust and mistrust among individual children.

PurposeIt is important to infer and diagnose whether a negotiator is trustworthy. In international negotiations, people may assume that high-trust nations are more likely to produce more trustworthy negotiators. Does this assumption hold universally? This study aims to address this research question by investigating the relationship between national-level societal trust and individual-level trust in negotiations.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses a cross-sectional research design and a sample of 910 senior managers from 58 nations or regions. The hypotheses are tested by hierarchical linear modeling.FindingsThis study draws on the dynamic constructivist theory of culture to propose moderated hypotheses. Results show that societal trust predicts individuals' social perceptions of attitudinal trust in negotiations, only when cultural face norms are weak rather than strong; societal trust predicts individuals' social perceptions of behavioral trust in negotiations (i.e. high information sharing and low competitive behavior), only when negotiators process information analytically rather than holistically.Originality/valueThis study is the first to examine the relationship between national-level societal trust (i.e. generalized trust) and individual-level trust in negotiations (i.e. particularistic trust). It uses a large-scale, multinational sample to show that relying on societal trust to infer trust in negotiations is valid only in Western societies.

Although the trust, as such, is not a legal concept in Dutch law and is difficult to fit into the current Dutch legal framework, there are certain Dutch legal concepts that share characteristics of a trust or that share the functionality of the trust. In this contribution, the subject matter of trusts in Dutch law is approached both from the perspective of trust characteristics as well as from the perspective of the functionality of the trust as a concept. This research is not only of interest for academic purposes, but also in the context of potential future legislation introducing the trust into Dutch law. We conclude that there is no fundamental objection against the introduction of the trust or new trust-like concepts in Dutch law. The introduction of a trust as a general concept would, however, require a substantial change of law.

In this article we argue that the experience and effects of trust are influenced by how people construe trust in specific situations – people are not merely passive receptacles of information but bring their own understanding of trust to social situations (Bandura, 1989). Drawing on the literature on conceptual metaphors we describe these as three trust-metaphors. These trust-metaphors we suggest have important ramifications for how people experience trust, how people go about developing trust and peoples' reactions to trust or changes in trust (trust-breaches). Different trust-metaphors mediate the link between situational contingencies and demands on the one hand and peoples' strategies for managing different social situations. Thus different metaphors here can be seen as corresponding to different «strategies» of managing different types of interdependence in different types of situations.

Abstract
This study attempts to resolve two issues in social trust research: the negative or positive effect of particularized trust (PT) and the causality between institutional trust (IT) and generalized trust (GT). It analyzes two types of data from South Korea: pooled data of cross-sectional national probability surveys; and online experimental three-wave panel data. Analyses of cross-sectional data suggest new classifications of trust types, family trust (FT) qualitatively different from PT, and the covariates of GT. Panel data analyses bolster the findings from cross-sectional data analysis and confirm a causal antecedence and lagged effects of IT. These findings imply that keys to achieving a high trust society are overcoming intense FT, expanding the radius of PT, and enhancing IT.