This study extends the rhetorical arena approach to crisis communication with an argumentative perspective. A rhetorical activity in which reasons are communicated to justify and obtain acceptance ...for a claim, argumentation plays a crucial role in (re)legitimizing corporate trustworthiness following a crisis episode. Arguments supporting or rejecting trust claims do not only pervade the corporate crisis response message (e.g., an apology), but also the public reactions in the rhetorical arena, i.e., the multivocal conversational space that opens up in a crisis context. Therefore, rhetorical arena crisis communication takes the form of an argumentative polylogue in which corporate trustworthiness features as the main issue. We develop a method for the analysis of trust-related polylogues occurring in rhetorical (sub-)arenas. Unlike existing methods, like tone analysis of online comments, our approach enables to examine, more specifically, the reasons organizations and stakeholders present for or against trust. This, in turn, provides an enhanced method to assess the effectiveness of a crisis response strategy. In order to illustrate our approach, we elaborate a case study based on an apologetic article published by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a sample of public reactions appearing on media articles and on subsequent online discussion websites.
Using customer service scenarios in an online retail context, the current study examines how cognitive and affective trust develop over time and how service failure negatively impacts trust, along ...with the trust restoration opportunities provided by recovery. Study 1 findings reveal that the relationship between Web site social perception and affective trust is stronger for repeat visitors than for first‐time visitors. Study 2 findings indicate that failure timing and recovery duration play important roles in service failure situations. Overall, the results demonstrate that consumer cognitive and affective trust develop through the number of interactions with a retail Web site over time and that increased Web site social perceptions facilitate the trust‐building process.
The more citizens trust their government, the better democracy functions. However, African Americans have long suffered from the lack of equal protection by their government, and the racial ...discrimination they have faced breaks down their trust in democracy. Rather than promoting democracy, the United States government has, from its inception, racially discriminated against African American citizens and other racial groups, denying them equal access to citizenship and to protection of the law. Civil rights violations by ordinary citizens have also tainted social relationships between racial groups-social relationships that should be meaningful for enhancing relations between citizens and the government at large. Thus, trust and democracy do not function in American politics the way they should, in part because trust is not color blind.Based on the premise that racial discrimination breaks down trust in a democracy,Trust in Black Americaexamines the effect of race on African Americans' lives. Shayla Nunnally analyzes public opinion data from two national surveys to provide an updated and contemporary analysis of African Americans' political socialization, and to explore how African Americans learn about race. She argues that the uncertainty, risk, and unfairness of institutionalized racial discrimination has led African Americans to have a fundamentally different understanding of American race relations, so much so that distrust has been the basis for which race relations have been understood by African Americans. Nunnally empirically demonstrates that race and racial discrimination have broken down trust in American democracy.
•Consumers’ brand trust can be transferred from their trust in other consumers and marketers in social media brand community (SMBC).•Consumer engagement partially mediates the process of trust ...transfer.•Consumer engagement in SMBC has a positive effect on brand trust. This effect is moderated by consumers’ device preference to access SMBC.
Social media brand communities (SMBCs) provide firms with a potential tool to develop brand relationships. The goal of this study is to understand the value of an SMBC to that brand by examining how the community contributes to one of the central brand relationship variables—brand trust. From the perspective of trust transfer, this study considers whether and how consumer trust in a brand can be transferred from other trusted parties in the SMBC, and the mediation of consumer engagement in this process. Based on a survey of 279 SMBC participants, this study demonstrates that consumer-to-consumer trust and consumer-to-marketer trust have positive impact on consumer engagement, which subsequently influence brand trust. Also the device usage was found to moderate the impact of consumer engagement on brand trust.
Trust plays a fundamental role in facilitating social exchange, yet recent global events have undermined trust in many of society’s institutions and organizations. This raises the pertinent question ...of how trust in organizations and institutions can be restored once it has been lost. The emerging literature on trust repair is largely focused at the micro level, with limited examination of how these processes operate at the macro level and across levels. In this introductory essay, we show how the papers in this special issue each advance our understanding of macro-level trust repair. We draw on these papers, as well as the extant interdisciplinary literature, to propose an integrated conceptual model of six key mechanisms for restoring trust in organizations and institutions, highlighting the merits, limits and paradoxes of each. We conclude that no single mechanism can be relied on to rebuild organizational trust and identify a future research agenda for advancing scholarly understanding of organizational and institutional trust repair.
Trust in Social Relations Schilke, Oliver; Reimann, Martin; Cook, Karen S
Annual review of sociology,
07/2021, Volume:
47, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Trust is key to understanding the dynamics of social relations, to the extent that it is often viewed as the glue that holds society together. We review the mounting sociological literature to help ...answer what trust is and where it comes from. To this end, we identify two research streams-on particularized trust and generalized trust, respectively-and propose an integrative framework that bridges these lines of research while also enhancing conceptual precision. This framework provides the springboard for identifying several important avenues for future research, including new investigations into the radius of trust, the intermediate form of categorical trust, and the interrelationships between different forms of trust. This article also calls for more scholarship focusing on the consequences (versus antecedents) of trust, addressing more fully the trustee side of the relation, and employing new empirical methods. Such novel approaches will ensure that trust research will continue to provide important insights into the functioning of modern society in the years to come.
Trust is vital yet vulnerable in economic exchange relations. In these relations, a widely used strategy in response to distributive harm consists of having the transgressor pay a financial ...compensation to the victim. This research examines whether financial compensations can increase trust towards a transgressor, and whether the size of the compensation is relevant to this process. We hypothesized and found that whether larger compensations will elicit more trust, depends on how clear the perpetrator’s intention to transgress was. Experiment 1 revealed that trust perceptions increased more by a slight overcompensation of the inflicted harm as compared to an exact or a partial compensation, but not if the transgressor’s bad intentions became clear through the use of deception in the violation. In Experiments 2 and 3, we replicated these findings and further showed that it is not the use of deception per se, but rather the attribution of bad intent that moderates the effect of compensation size. Experiment 4, using a trust game paradigm revealed that this effect not only occurs for small overcompensations, but also for larger overcompensations.
The contagiousness and deadliness of COVID-19 have necessitated drastic social management to halt transmission. The immediate effects of a nationwide lockdown were investigated by comparing matched ...samples of New Zealanders assessed before (Nprelockdown = 1,003) and during the first 18 days of lockdown (Nlockdown = 1,003). Two categories of outcomes were examined: (a) institutional trust and attitudes toward the nation and government and (b) health and well-being. Applying propensity score matching to approximate the conditions of a randomized controlled experiment, the study found that people in the pandemic/lockdown group reported higher trust in science, politicians, and police, higher levels of patriotism, and higher rates of mental distress compared to people in the prelockdown prepandemic group. Results were confirmed in within-subjects analyses. The study highlights social connectedness, resilience, and vulnerability in the face of adversity and has applied implications for how countries face this global challenge.
Public Significance Statement
This study describes the immediate effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and nationwide lockdown on levels of institutional trust and attitudes toward the nation and government and health and well-being in New Zealand, with implications for other nations. Our results suggest that a strong national response to COVID-19 may bolster national attachment and increase trust in the bodies determining and enforcing lockdown guidelines. Against a backdrop of general resilience, small increases in psychological distress serve as a warning about potential psychological consequences of lockdown and isolation.
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