Measuring Trust: Experiments and Surveys in Contrast and Combination

By Michael Naef, Jürgen Schupp. Social Science Research Network, 2009

233 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Trust is a concept that has attracted - significant attention in economic theory and research within the last two decades: it has been applied in a number of contexts and has been investigated both as an explanatory and as a dependent variable. In this paper, we explore the questions of what exactly is measured by the diverse survey-derived scales and experiments claiming to measure trust, and how these different measures are related. Using nationally representative data, we test a commonly used experimental measure of trust for robustness to a number of interferences, finding it to be mostly unsusceptible to stake size, the extent of strategy space, the use of the strategy method, and the characteristics of the experimenters. Inspired by criticism of the widespread trust question used in many surveys, we created a new, improved survey trust scale consisting of three short statements. We show that the dimension of this scale is distinct from trust in institutions and trust in known others. Our new scale is a valid and reliable measure of trust in strangers. The scale is valid in the sense that it correlates with trusting behaviour in the experiment. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the test-retest reliability of six weeks is high. The experimental measure of trust is, on the other hand, not significantly correlated with trust in institutions nor with trust in known others. We therefore conclude that the experimental measure of trust refers not to trust in a general sense, but specifically to trust in strangers.

Subfields: Demography, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/762c39014e94cd6776cdddeb1a0de22bff9725cc

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Citations in the corpus

Growing to Trust (2015, background): “…measure has been shown to converge with trust behavior (i.e., money transferred in a social dilemma game; Fehr et al., 2003; see also Knack, 2001; Naef & Schupp, 2009), (2) we were able to augment this measure by other measures of interpersonal trust (e.g., people met for the first time, people…”
Trust and Wellbeing (2010, unknown): “Although sometimes doubted because of their subjective nature, these assessments have been shown to be consistent both with laboratory (Naef and Schupp 2009) and field (Knack 2001) experiments.”
On the Economics and Biology of Trust (2009, background): “8 Naef and Schupp (2008) found that questionnaire measures of trust – even those not subject to the same criticism as the GSS measure – seem to be affected by social desirability bias, while behavioral measures of trust are not affected.”
Is the importance of religion in daily life related to social trust? Cross-country and cross-state comparisons (2011, background): “Both detailed empirical studies and recent experimental data suggest that one must therefore acknowledge the conceptual differences between types of trust (Naef and Schupp, 2009; Alesina and Guiliano, in press).”
Trust games: A meta-analysis (2011, background): “Naef and Schupp (2008) argue that Americans display more trust than Germans.”
Trust, Positive Reciprocity, and Negative Reciprocity: Do These Traits Impact Entrepreneurial Dynamics? (2010, background): “7 This broad definition of entrepreneurship is frequently used in economics and psychology; see inter alia Stewart and Roth (2001) or Rauch and Frese (2007). 8 We thus employ only one success measure, namely survival in self-employment according to which individuals continue to remain self-employed.”