A comparative study of the effects of an intermediary on the trust decisions and perception of Chinese and westerners

Abstract

Trust has long been regarded by psychologists and other social scientists as a fundamental component of social competence and social functioning. In recent years, the issue of trust has attracted increased research attention due to the spread of globalization and calls for greater understanding across cultures. However, the role of the intermediary in situations of mediated trust is overlooked in the existing research, which focuses mainly on situations of direct, unmediated trust. Mediated trust is important to Chinese people because of their preference for indirect/mediated communication. The research presented in this thesis is grounded in a review of studies on trust decisions and perception in intergroup situations without an intermediary. This direct trust literature has led to a dual-process model of trust comprising group-based trust, which has been observed among East Asians (e.g. Japanese and Chinese) and Westerners (e.g. Americans and Australians), and relationship-based trust, which has only been observed among East Asians (e.g. Japanese). The extant research attributes group-based trust to the predominance of the collective social self across cultures, whereas relationship-based trust is attributed to the relational social self, which is believed to be more readily activated within East Asian than Western cultures. The cross-cultural comparison of trust is further developed in this thesis to explore two research questions that have important theoretical implications. First, does the involvement of an intermediary make a difference to trust decisons and trust perception compared to situations of direct trust? Second, does the presence of an intermediary have different effects among Chinese and Westerners? I conducted two studies on mediated trust to test hypotheses concerning the effects of an intermediary in intergroup (Study 1) and interpersonal contexts (Study 2). The intergroup experiment in Study 1 examined differences in direct and mediated trust in two separate samples of Chinese and Australian university students by measuring the participants' investment decisions (a measure of trust) and expected reciprocity in an investment trust game. Compared to the situations of direct trust (no intermediary), the involvement of an intermediary in the mediated trust situations raised the Chinese participants level of investment in outgroup trustees, and increased the number of Chinese investors who expected the ingroup trustees to return a profit on their investments. As predicted, these findings were not observed in the Australian sample. However, the two samples showed similar group-based trust by investing more in ingroup than in outgroup trustees, and this group-based trust was significant in both the direct and mediated trust situations. Overall, the results of Study 1 suggest that the East Asian relational social self was more responsive to the cultural differences in group-based mediated trust than the collective self. Study 2 examined the preferences for two types of intermediary when renting or buying an apartment from a stranger, namely, an informal intermediary (a common friend) or a formal intermediary (a property agent), and compared this with dealing directly with the owner. The participants were drawn from a community sample of Chinese adults in mainland China and a community sample of European Americans in the United States. As hypothesized, the Chinese participants preferred an informal intermediary and their percerived trust in the stranger was highest in this situation. This effect was not observed in the American sample, who preferred a formal intermediary or direct interaction to an informal intermediary. A series of mediation analyses indicated that the Chinese relational self had direct and indirect effects on trust, but these effects were not observed in the American sample. In sum, the research presented in this thesis extends the literature on cross-cultural comparisons of trust. The findings from the two empirical studies generally support the main hypothesis that the presence of an intermediary affects Chinese but not Westerners' behavioral and perceived trust. This hypothesis is based on the basic assumption that the cultural differences in the Chinese and Western relational selves are responsible for the diverse effects of an intermediary on Chinese and Westerners' (intergroup and interpersonal) mediated trust. Overall, the findings of this thesis have implications for trust in other mediated situations, such as online merchants in the e-marketplace, and business transactions between Westerners and Chinese.

Date of Award	2 Oct 2013
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Chuk Ling Julian LAI (Supervisor) & Sik Hung NG (Supervisor)