Trust is good, control is better: the role of trust and personal control in response to threat
Publication date
2024-07-25
Document type
Forschungsartikel
Author
Organisational unit
Publisher
Wiley
Series or journal
Journal of Applied Social Psychology
ISSN
Periodical volume
54
Periodical issue
9
First page
552
Last page
571
Peer-reviewed
✅
Part of the university bibliography
✅
Language
English
Abstract
Individuals often lack personal control over societal threats and depend on powerful others to manage such threats on their behalf. This lack of personal control could lead individuals to derive threat evaluations from the trustworthiness of powerful others. Three cross‐sectional studies ( N = 1938) support this proposed interaction of trust with personal control in diverse domains (i.e., the coronavirus pandemic, the climate crisis, and farmed animal suffering). In line with the assertion that individuals evaluate uncontrollable threats by resorting to beliefs about powerful others' willingness to avert a threat, beliefs in the benevolence of governmental bodies (but no other trustees or trust attributions) drive the effects of trust on threat perceptions depending on personal control. The findings remained the same even when controlling for potential confounding variables, such as perceived knowledge, the affect heuristic, responsibility attributions, and political orientation. Furthermore, the data indicate that trust in powerful others managing a threat partially backfires in people who lack personal control by indirectly thwarting behavioral responses and policy support for managing the threat. The present findings advance the understanding of why trust predicts perceptions of threat and suggest that trust has partially detrimental consequences for managing threats that are beyond an individual's sense of personal control.
Description
This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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