Cognitive bias and trust - Why do we not trust when we should and trust when we should not

Trust is an input condition in social systems by which supportive and collaborative activities can be encouraged in situations of uncertainty or risk (Luhmann, 1988). How people reach the decision to become willing to be... [ view full abstract ]

Trust is an input condition in social systems by which supportive and collaborative activities can be encouraged in situations of uncertainty or risk (Luhmann, 1988). How people reach the decision to become willing to be vulnerable under such conditions depends on multiple antecedents ranging from trustor personality attributes and evaluations of trustees to other aspects operating in a given situation (Dietz & Hartog, 2006; Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995). Trust is inherently probabilistic, due to the involvement of risks which in themselves have uncertain outcomes. Each time trust is extended, one expects that implicit vulnerabilities will not be exposed by the trustee’s actions, regardless of the extent to which these can be minimised or controlled. One expects the trustee to protect one’s interest regarding one’s vulnerability, but ultimately there are no guarantees. Trust at a behavioural level is a process of acting as if it is the most probable path perceived to lead to a desired state whilst minimising losses that could arise from the actions of the trustee. Trustors become ontologically committed to their choice of action on the basis of a set of assumptions that are either true or turn out to be false. While there is no problem for the trustor when exchange results in a true positive or negative, the false positive risks exposure to vulnerabilities and false negatives risks not taking opportunities that are available. This is the basic ontological dilemma faced by the trustor and the problem that this paper seeks to explore: Why do we not trust when we should and trust when we should not? It focusses on the role of cognitive and affective biases in trustors’ misplacing of their trust and distrust.

Trust has previously been described as a form of bias, for example Yamagishi and Yamagishi (1994) view a general tendency to trust as a form of cognitive bias, in contrast with trust that is based on information about specific people in the trust situation. Insights from studies of confidence tricksters, in particular, also highlight a multitude of biases and distortions in thinking and perceiving (including both hot and cold biases) that impact on perception, and are exploited to confuse, manipulate and ultimately gain victims’ trust (Boles, Davis, & Tatro, 1983; Gasser, 1963; Lyons & Mehta, 1997; McCaghy & Nogier, 1984).

There has been an abundance of work on judgement and decision-making showing that human reasoning does not conform to rationality (Kahneman, 2003; Klein, Orasanu, Calderwood, & Zsambok; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974) (Tversky & Kahneman, 1971). Thought is characterised by the tendency to create internally coherent narratives of events (Robinson & Hawpe, 1986), without people necessarily being aware of the automatic and unconscious processes that influence their thinking and reality constructions (Rokeach, 1964). Biases arise from the activation and suspension of thoughts and evaluations; in trust situations it is reasonable to assume that these are also operative as a result of the trustor making sense of their trust situation (Möllering, 2001).

The relationship between trust and bias is also evident in research on small groups. Evidence from studies on small group processes and social identity indicate that favourable perceptions of group members, including trust and trustworthiness perceptions, are a feature of ingroups (Brewer & Silver, 1978; Dion, 1973). More recently Chattopahyay and George (2001) demonstrated that groups dominated by temporary workers (e.g. those not commonly part of the same ingroup) displayed less trust among peers than those dominated by a strong ingroup. However, biases are not just confined to perception of self, and ingroup and outgroup members. Ferrin and Dirks (2003) reported that trust situations can be influenced by the presentation of rewards, which influence trust through social and self-perception and through attributional and schema-activation processes that provide causal explanations of other people’s behaviour. Langfred (2004) showed that under some circumstances trust among team members seems to function similarly to groupthink bias by reducing the level of teams’ attention and focus on their own performance.

Despite a fecund literature on bias in decision-making and trust in individual decision-making and in group processes, questions about the role of bias in trust appear not to have received a great deal of focussed attention together. Recent work on the neuropsychology of decision-making and trust provides fresh insights into the relationship between trust and bias (Dimoka, 2010; Filkowski, Anderson, & Haas, 2016; Haas, Ishak, Anderson, & Filkowski, 2015). Furthermore recent studies have also started to raise questions about the role of singular personality correlates of trust and the influence of multiple sources of variance in trustworthiness evaluations and trust (Frazier, Johnson, & Fainshmidt, 2013; Patent & Searle, in preparation) Finally, when thinking about behavioural trust as a choice from an array of multiple ontological paths, the challenge of selecting the true positive and true negatives becomes apparent. Knowing what prevents trustors from making those choices is of significant value to both research and practice. Therefore a theoretical exploration of trust and cognitive bias integrating insights from information processing seems both relevant and timely.

This paper provides theoretical support for a cognitive bias perspective on trust. The main conceptual questions are: When and how is trust caused by biased responding? How much does pre-existing trust influence cognitive bias (e.g. are familiarity effects caused by trust)? Methodological questions arise because of the different methodologies employed in decision-making research and the trust literature. How can one concurrently research both trust and bias? What measures and techniques are needed for such an investigation? Finally there are practical questions, such as what implications are there to using insights into cognitive bias for managing, repairing, and maintaining trust.

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