Putting a spotlight on the trustor in trust research

Abstract

One important reason why trust and trustworthiness should not be confounded (e.g. Hardin, 2002) is that the latter focuses our attention mainly on the trustee and away from the trustor. Even when we are careful to talk about ‘perceived trustworthiness’ (e.g. Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995, p. 715, Figure 1, emphasis added) – which should convey that it is up to trustors to interpret any cues of trustworthiness – there is a tendency to see trust mainly as a result of the trustees’ given characteristics, especially the likelihood they will honour trust. Similarly, the ‘standard’ survey question used by psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, economists and others (see, e.g. Uslaner, 2015) to the present day asks respondents, if they think ‘most people can be trusted’. The question is thus phrased with reference to the trustee side, instead of checking the trustor side and probing, for example, if ‘most people are willing to trust’ or at least the respondents themselves are ‘mostly willing to trust’. Somewhat paradoxically, answers to the widely used ‘standard’ question are actually supposed to tell us something about the trustors answering (their propensity to trust, see also the comments on Patent & Searle, 2019 below) rather than about the actual trustworthiness of all those potential trustees out there. Who are ‘most people’ supposed to be in the first place (see Delhey, Newton, & Welzel, 2011 on the ‘radius of trust’ problem)? Still, the trustors’ (propensity to) trust is framed primarily as a matter of trustee trustworthiness, obscuring any other factors that might influence the trustors’ trustfulness and actual trusting actions. Trustworthiness and trustfulness go together, of course, especially if we do not merely see them as static dispositions but as dynamic accomplishments in trusting relationships. However, researchers tend to be preoccupied with trustworthiness. This has not always been so and it may well be the case that early trust research focused too much on trustors and individual traits that would explain their willingness to trust (Rotter, 1967; Wrightsman, 1966) so that later trust research went the other way and examined mainly the trustees’ incentives or inclinations to be trustworthy. Jones and Shah (2016) provide a very helpful analysis of how the ‘locus of trust’ may shift from trustor to trustee to dyadic influences, which unfortunately still refers mainly to the dimensions of perceived trustworthiness as the dependent variables instead of also devising a model of the trustor’s trustfulness. In this vein, Lu, Kong, Ferrin, and Dirks (2017) present evidence that trustor attributes, along with shared attributes but not trustee attributes, influence trust in negotiations. Hence I am glad to announce that the current issue of Journal of Trust Research (JTR) contains articles that put a spotlight on the trustor again. For sure they do a lot more than this and they all contribute various valuable insights beyond this one aspect that I have chosen to point out here, but I am confident that all authors will agree that their particular stories revolve especially around trustors, not only trustees. Before showcasing their contributions in more detail below, there is good news on behalf of the Editorial Team. JTR is now included in the revised Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) Journal Quality List (https://abdc.edu.au/research/abdc-journal-list/). The application for inclusion was filed and signed by our Australia-based colleagues Tyler Okimoto, Nicole Gillespie, Matthew Hornsey, Bart de Jong, Steven Lui, Bo Bernhard Nielsen, Natalia Nikolova and Michael Rosemann. Powerful endorsements were also provided by the following leading