Judgment Accuracy of Other's Trustworthiness and General Trust: An Experimental Study

Abstract

The experiment reported in this paper supported a hypothesis that subjects who are more trusting of others in general (high-trusters) are more accurate than low-trusters in judging trustworthiness of others, the hypothesis derived from Rotter's (1980) claim that trust does not mean gullibility and from Kosugi & Yamagishi's (1995) finding that high-trusters are more responsive to information potentially revealing lack of trustworthiness in others than low-trusters. The result suggests that general trust or“default”expectation of other's trustworthiness in the lack of any information about the target is independent of judgment of a specific other's trustworthiness based on some information about that person. In other words, high-trusters are shown to be prudent people who pay careful attention to information potentially revealing other's lack of trustworthiness, rather than being gullible or naïve people.