Trust in the Law: Encouraging Public Cooperation with the Police and Courts

Chapter 5. Motive-Based Trust and Decision Acceptance

Chapter 5 Motive-Based Trust and Decision Acceptance THE SECOND social factor that may shape individuals' willing acceptance of the decisions of legal authorities is motive-based trust. Trust in a person's motives or character refers to his or her internal , unobservable characteristics that are inferred from his or her observable actions. Psychologists have long recognized that one of our central goals in dealing with another person, regardless of whether that person is in a position of authority, is making inferences about the motivations shaping his or her actions. Our focus in this chapter on people's inferences about the trustworthiness of other people's motives flows from that recognition. When we deal with other people, we observe their actions, but their overt actions usually do not directly communicate their motivations. Instead, we must infer the motivations that are causing other people's actions. We cannot directly observe the motivations of others. As a result, motive attributions are inferences that one person makes about another using the behavior observed in a given situation, the behavior observed on previous occasions, the other person's statements explaining his or her behavior, and general social knowledge. The field of attribution theory within social psychology seeks to identify the rules people use to make such motive attributions (Fiske and Taylor 1991; Heider 1958). Attribution theory emphasizes the ambiguities inherent in understanding the motivations that lead to observed behaviors. It is seldom obvious or completely clear why people are doing what they are doing. Instead, there are usually several possible motivations that could explain why they are engaged in a particular action. For example, in the context of social interaction even a simple act of seeming kindness-for example, helping someone up from a chair-could be a calculated effort to mislead and exploitby creating trust that will later be betrayed to the Motive-Based Trust and Decision Acceptance 59 helper's advantage. Hence, people devote considerable effort to understanding the character of other people in social settings by discerning "true" character and motivation from a complex set of social cues. One central motive attribution that people seek to make is whether the person they are dealing with is "trustworthy." In interactions with police officers and judges, people make inferences about the degree to which the authority can be trusted to act in ways that are responsive to their own needs and concerns. We refer to this assessment of trustworthiness as a form of "motive-based" trust to suggest that it is linked to views about the character of the other person. One level of trust is the ability to trust that people will behave as expected, based on their promises or our knowledge of their pastbehavior . We refer to this as instrumental trust because it is linked to the ability that we believe we have to predict what other people will do in the future. For example, if the police say that they will respond to a call from a member of the public and then fail to respond, this is a clear and simple failure to follow through on a commitment to act. People who fail in this way strike us as not trustworthy in the sense that they may not act as they agreed to act-their behavior cannot be predicted in advance based onwhat they say they will do. Trust as predictability due to a willingness to keep promises-instrumental trust-is one level on which trust is studied. For example, Burt and Knez (1996,70) define trust as "anticipated cooperation." Approaches that link trust assessments to one's perceived ability to estimateothers' future actions have beenlabeled"cognitive" approaches to trust by Kramer (1999). Attention to such future actions illustrates a key elementof social interaction-the elementofrisk. When people interact with others, their outcomesbecome intertwined with the outcomes of others. This creates the possibility that one person's failure to act as agreed will hurt the interests ofanother person within a relationship. On some level, each person must make estimates of the likelihood that others will keep their agreements and not act opportunistically (Bradach and Eccles 1989). Those estimates of how others are likely to act in the future are cognitive estimates of their trustworthiness. This cognitive model of trust is consistent with the image of trust that emerges from the largeliterature on rational choice (Coleman 1990; Williamson 1993). In this literature, trust is based on the view that people are rational actors who judge the probable actions of others...