Deciding to trust a stranger: An exploratory study of how people make decisions based on general interpersonal trust (with implications for organizational settings)

Interpersonal trust is widely considered to be a key success factor in most personal, intra- and inter-organizational relationships. The hypothetical model of interpersonal trust that is popular in management science includes specific trust, which is particular to the situation, task and person to be trusted, and general trust, which is a stable personality factor. The purpose of this research was to investigate the effects of general trust by addressing two questions: first, how does a person make decisions to trust or withhold trust from a stranger and, second, does a person's level of general trust affect his trust-related decision-making process and, if so, how? General trust was conceived and operationalized as comprising two factors, dispositional trust and caution.; Designed as an exploratory study, with a theoretical sample of fifteen graduate students, the investigation employed the Problem-Centered Interview, a grounded theory method. In a laboratory setting, each participant was interviewed while he played the Trust Game, a sequential-play version of the Prisoner's Dilemma Game, with a partner whom he had no opportunity to meet or communicate with other than to signal his moves in the game. Each participant played two games, each with a different partner. Pre- and post-test questionnaires, including a general trust instrument, provided complementary data on the participants' levels of dispositional trust and caution, goals, demographics and other relevant factors.; The study produced an intricate set of data which was organized into a structural model of the general trust-based decision-making process. When examined on a case-by-case basis, the data showed that the high-, medium- and low-trusters differed in how they conceived the situation, what considerations were important to them, what meanings they construed from the information available, what decisions they made and how they behaved. These factors clustered into four identifiable approaches to decision-making that were characteristic of participants with different levels of trust. Overall, the findings of the study suggest that an individual's level of general trust has a far greater influence on his decision-making behavior than has been supposed or concluded in most organizational trust research. This has implications for future research, management education and organizational practice.