The dominant approach to measuring trust has been via self-report questionnaire surveys. This approach to measuring latent constructs, commonly known as the psychometric approach, typically takes the form of a multi-item survey that includes a variety of questions intended to capture different trust components (McEvily & Tortoriello, 2011). Broadly, such measures will ask to what extent people trust a specific other or group. This approach treats trust as a psychological state and so measures trust as individual level phenomena (Rousseau et al., 1999). Trust has been considered as a multi-faceted concept in this review, therefore measures that tap different components of trust (beliefs and intentions), as well as trust outcomes and trust propensity are reviewed. Finally, a divergence from the dominant psychometric approach is reviewed in the form of behavioural measures of trust, where trust outcomes are operationalized as trust decisions in experimental economic games (Berg, Dickhaut, & McCabe, 1995). This completes a review of the instruments available for measuring trust, which are the platform for a new language measure.
1.5.1. Trust propensity measures
Measures have been devised to assess the propensity to trust others in general, or ones disposition to trust. Like other measures of personality traits, questionnaires and survey items are used to measure trust propensity. Typical trust propensity items include positively and negatively scored items such as ‘I believe people are basically moral’ and ‘I am wary of others’ (Mayer et al., 1999). Given the possibility that an individual’s trust propensities will influence trust in online contexts, trust propensity survey items form a useful control measure for exploration of situational online trust in the present thesis.
1.5.2. Trust beliefs and trust intention measures
Trust toward another person or group has been measured via items designed to assess one’s trust beliefs and intentions. A review by McEvily and Tortoriello (2011) revealed that questionnaire items to measure trust beliefs and intentions have become extremely fragmented. Their review identified 38 different dimensions of trust, with little replication and validation of many of these. To accommodate for this, McEvily and Tortoriello (2011) highlighted five noteworthy measures of trust that were developed with a great deal of rigour and were the most highly replicable. The five measures are those developed by McAllister (1995), Currall and Judge (1995), Cummings and Bromiley (1996), Mayer and Davis (1999), and Gillespie (2003). Of the five, Mayer and Davis’ (1999) measure was found to have been replicated the most (McEvily & Tortoriello, 2011).
Mayer and Davis’ measure, as one might expect, captures perceptions about trust beliefs. That is to say that, beliefs about a trustee’s ability (e.g., my co-worker would be highly qualified in their field), benevolence (e.g., my co-worker would not knowingly do anything to hurt anyone) and integrity (e.g., my co-worker is guided by sound principles). Furthermore, the measure is the only one to capture two theoretical models of trust beliefs. That is to say that, the measure naturally captures the three trustworthiness factors of Mayer et al.’s (1995) model. However, ability and benevolence/integrity beliefs often converge, respectively, onto cognitive and affective trust beliefs of McAllister’s (1995) model (McKnight & Chervany, 2001). Trust intention measures are also proposed in Mayer et al.’s (1995) inventory. Items in Mayer et al. (1995) relate to ones willingness to rely on another (e.g., I would be comfortable giving my manager a task or problem which was critical to me, even if I could not monitor their actions). For these reasons, Mayer and Davis’ (1995) measure
of trust beliefs and intentions is proposed as the most complete psychometric measure of trust.
1.5.3. Trust behaviour measures
Research efforts have operationalized trust outcomes in social experiments, this is important to establishing a new language measure of trust as it offers
standardized means to assess how varying language impacts trust with regard to
observable trust behaviour. Thus offering an additional measure to comparing
language to psychometrically reported trust. The first to propose that trust could be operationized in such a way was Deutsch (1958) in a series of prisoner dilemma style games. These experiments suggested that trust behaviour could be observed as cooperative moves in a risky situation. For example, in prisoner dilemma games two players play a game with monetary reward. The outcome with the highest pay off is for one party to defect while the other cooperates, next is cooperation by both players, followed by joint defect. Typically, in repeat games, cooperative behaviour is
accepted as an observable manifestation of trust (Axelrod, 1984).
An alternative to prisoner dilemma style games has been proposed by Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe (1995), and relates to ‘trust games’. In the standard trust game, participants are divided into two groups: Senders and Recipients. Each Sender is anonymously paired with a Recipient. Senders are then given a sum of money and must decide how much of this money, if any, to transfer to the Recipient. The
experimenter triples the amount of money transferred. The Recipient must then decide how much of the money, if any, to return to the Sender. The amount of money sent is interpreted as a measure of the Sender's trust in the Recipient, while the amount returned is interpreted as a measure of trustworthiness, or reciprocity (Bacharach & Gambetta, 2001).
Trust games are asynchronous (one party is the trustee while the other is the trustor) while prisoner dilemma style games are synchronous (each party is the trustee and trustor at the same time). As measures of trust outcomes this leads to two
noteworthy advantages of the trust game over prisoner dilemma style games. First, the synchrony in prisoner dilemma style games limits their ecological validity. We rarely have to reach a trust decision at exactly the same time without knowing the other’s decision (Riegelsberger et al, 2003). The trust game more closely replicates many everyday trust situations, where a trustee acts to fulfil or defect on the trust invested by the trustor. Second, using the trust game, behaviours leading to trust can be more precisely modelled. In the trust game the behaviour of the trustee and trustor that lead to trust can be explored separately. This feature is important to the thesis as it allows for the relationship between language and trust of respective parties to be analysed independently.
Importantly, performance on the trust game has been shown to associate with some of the psychometric measures of trust components described above. For example, decisions on the trust game have been shown to be mediated by perceived trustworthiness (Delgado, Frank, & Phelps, 2005) and trust intention (Brülhart & Usunier, 2012), and trust has been supported as the dominant factor in motivating behaviour even when compared to factors such as altruism (Brülhart & Jean-Claude Usunier, 2012). Interestingly, the trust game measure of trust behaviour and
psychometric measures of trust have rarely been used in combination; despite offering a comprehensive means to assess trust propensity, trust beliefs, trust intentions and trust behaviour. Furthermore, such a combination of measures has yet to be used to assess trust in online interactions. As a platform for developing a novel language measure of trust, a combination of psychometric and behavioural trust measures, in
the form of instruments proposed in this section, is proposed for this thesis as the most holistic and robust means to assess trust.