Trust is good, control is better: The role of trust and personal control in response to threat

Abstract

Individuals often lack personal control over societal threats and depend on powerful others to manage such threats on their behalf. This lack of personal control could lead individuals to derive threat evaluations from the trustworthiness of powerful others. Three cross-sectional studies (N = 1938) support this proposed interaction of trust with personal control in diverse domains (i.e., the coronavirus pandemic, the climate crisis, and farmed animal suffering). In line with the assertion that individuals evaluate uncontrollable threats by resorting to beliefs about powerful others' willingness to avert a threat, beliefs in the benevolence of governmental bodies (but no other trustees or trust attributions) drive the effects of trust on threat perceptions depending on personal control. The findings remained the same even when controlling for potential confounding variables, such as perceived knowledge, the affect heuristic, responsibility attributions, and political orientation. Furthermore, the data indicate that trust in powerful others managing a threat partially backfires in people who lack personal control by indirectly thwarting behavioral responses and policy support for managing the threat. The present findings advance the understanding of why trust predicts perceptions of threat and suggest that trust has partially detrimental consequences for managing threats that are beyond an individual's sense of personal control.