The Empirical Study On College Students’ Trust Level To Strangers And Influencing Factors

To human beings, trust is as important as the air. Without trust, there is onlyinterests and mutual scheme among people. Trust is the chemical bond of human society,which offers relatively steady expectation for all uncertain factors in interpersonalinteraction. However, because of its uncertainty, trust is full of risk. Today, with therapid development of our economy and society, a big change occurs to interpersonalinteraction modes with social relationships becoming multi-faceted. Being trapped by astrange job-hunter, being wronged as the peace-breaker for helping the old, losing moremoney for returning the picked-up money, all these cases reinforce the sense of distrustamong people. Mutual distrust adds the cost for the function of the society: keeping asharp look out for the strangers in case that they hurt us, people complain the coldnessand moral downturn of the society; keeping reminding the relatives that they shouldn’thelp the victims, people criticize others who do not save the victims. All these dilemmaof human beings indicate that human conscience and traditional merits do not everdisappear, which makes it become an academic hot topic that how to build a trustmechanism which adapt to the development of our society and economy.This study makes a thorough study on the trust among strangers of college studentswith the methods such as literature analysis, questionnaire investigation, behavioralexperiment. There are altogether3study contents: college students’ stereotyped imageto strangers, the structure of level and its current state of college students’ trust tostrangers, and the influencing factors of college students’ trust on strangers.The conclusions of this study are as follows:(1) College students’ impression on the strange can be divided into4indicators:subject’s cognition, subject’s emotion, object’s characteristics and object’s role. Ingeneral, college students’ bear a negative attitudes toward the strange.(2) The level of college students’ impression toward the strange can be divided intofive dimensions: sense of efficacy on risk control, positive and kind life prediction, theinclination to help others, the evaluation to social trust and the acceptation of losinginterests. The level of College Students’ Trust towards the Strange Questionnaire has ahigh reliability and validity, which can be used as an effective tool to evaluate collegestudents’ level of trust to the strange.(3) College students’ level of trust to the strange and its five factors get a medium score, among which positive and kind life prediction and the inclination to help othersare higher than the rest two.(4) The overall score and score on every dimension of level of trust to the strangeof college students with different gender reach no remarkable differences. Amongcollege students with different grades, the freshmen’s inclination to help others gets aremarkably higher score than other grades; among college students with differentmajors, students majoring in science and industry get a remarkably higher score than thestudents majoring in literature and history in the dimension of sense of efficacy on riskcontrol; non-only-child students higher than the only-child students in the dimension ofthe acceptation of losing interests. Among students with different habitation locations,students from cities get a lower score than their counterparts from the rural in trust onthe strange. In addition, students from the rural get remarkable higher score than thestudents from the citied in both the dimensions of the evaluation to social trust and theacceptation of losing interests.(5) College Students’ trust to the strangers is located in the medium level, whichwill be slightly improved if they are affected by positive experience, and greatlydegraded if they are affected by passive experience. In terms of positive experience,positive self-experience can improve students trust level, but others’ experience makesno difference; in terms of passive experience, both the two kinds of experience cangreatly degraded their trust level.(6) In terms of gender, college students are more inclined to believe in the malethan the female; in terms of age, the elder is the most distrustful group for the students,and people of other ages make no difference; in terms of profession, college studentshave a higher trust level to the police, the soldier, the doctor and the teacher, but theopposite fact to the farmer, the servant, the businessman and the worker.(7) College students’ trust towards the strange has a conformity effect. When thereare1-3people for reference, the conformity effect is outstanding.