Distrust in scientific experts can be surprisingly stubborn, persisting despite evidence supporting the experts’ views, demonstrations of their competence, or displays good will. This stubborn distrust is often viewed as a manifestation irrationality. By contrast, this article proposes logic “status distrust”: low-status individuals are objectively vulnerable to collective decision-making, and ...

This paper considers the decision of Pennsylvania communities whether to levy a 1% wage tax. While a simple political economy model suggests this tax should be enacted when many residents are exempted from the tax, the opposite pattern seems to hold. One explanation is that residents may mistrust their government and fear that the new tax monies will be spent unwisely. Several implications of t...

Past studies of strategic thinking have shown that the encoding of the message information becomes more complex under distrust. Receivers process the information as if they are trying to protect themselves from being misled by testing alternative potential interpretations. The present study investigates the possibility that when people are mistrustful they spontaneously activate associations th...

Trust is a key factor in consumer decisions about website engagement. Consumers will engage with sites they deem trustworthy and turn away from those they mistrust. In this paper we present a framework for understanding trust factors in web based health advice. The framework is derived from a staged model of trust and allows predictions to be made concerning user engagement with different healt...

This exploratory research explores the emotional perspective of online distrust, where distrust is a fear. Fear is one of the negative emotions where the situational state is motive-inconsistent and uncertainty is present. A review of literature explores distrust as a fear, emotions, emotional learning and identifies cognitive dimensions consistent with fear. These cognitive dimensions are moti...

Atheists are distrusted in societies with religious majorities. However, relatively little is known about the underlying reasons for this phenomenon. Previous evidence suggests that distrust of atheists is in part the result of believers thinking that being under supernatural surveillance by a watchful God underlies moral behavior. However, secular rule of law, including institutions such as po...

Traditionally, researchers in decision making have focused on attempting to reach Pareto Optimality using horizontal approaches, where optimality is calculated taking into account every participant at the same time. Sometimes, this may prove to be a difficult task (e.g., conflict, mistrust, no information sharing, etc.). In this paper, we explore the possibility of achieving Pareto Optimal outc...