(Dis)Trust

The development of distrust.

Preschool-age children's reasoning about the reliability of deceptive sources was investigated. Ninety 3- to 5-year-olds watched several trials in which an informant gave advice about the location of a hidden sticker. Informants were either helpers who were happy to give correct advice, or trickers who were happy to give incorrect advice. Three-year-olds tended to accept all advice from both he...

Distrust, race, and research.

BACKGROUND Investigators have voiced concerns that distrust of research and the medical community impedes successful recruitment of African Americans into clinical research. OBJECTIVES To examine possible differences in distrust by race and to determine to what extent other sociodemographic factors explain any racial differences in distrust. METHODS We analyzed data from 527 African America...

Trust, Distrust, and Power

Distrust and Political Turnover∗

We present findings that document one way in which a society’s culture can affect political outcomes. Examining an annual panel of democratic countries over six decades, we show that severe economic downturns are more likely to cause political turnover in countries that have lower levels of generalized trust. We find no such relationship in non-democratic countries or on irregular leader turnov...

Deciding to Distrust

Iris Bohnet and Stephan Meier Abstract: We employ experiments to illustrate one factor contributing to the lack of distrust in the recent corporate scandals: Trust rather than no trust was the default. People are more trusting when the default is full trust than when it is no trust. We introduce a new game, the distrust game (DTG), where the default is full trust and find that in it, trust lev...