From the general to the specific: How social trust motivates relational trust

• Examine the relationship between social trust and relational trust.
• Use two novel web-based vignette experiments.
• Data collection yields two large convenience samples and two large random samples.
• Employ two-level correlated random-effects models.
• Find that general social trust and particular social trust are positively associated with relational trust.

When people form beliefs about the trustworthiness of others with respect to particular matters (i.e., when individuals trust), theory suggests that they rely on preexistent cognitive schemas regarding the general cooperativeness of individuals and organizations (i.e., social trust). In spite of prior work, the impact of social trust on relational trust—or what Russell Hardin (2002) calls trust as a three-part relation where actor A trusts actor B with reference to matter Y—is not well established. Four vignette experiments were administered to Amazon.com Mechanical Turk workers (N = 1388 and N = 1419) and to public university undergraduate students (N = 995 and N = 956) in order to investigate the relationship between social trust and relational trust. Measures of general social trust and particular social trust produced statistically equivalent effects that were positively associated with relational trust. Political trust, however, was statistically unrelated to relational trust. These results support the idea that people rely on schemas and stereotypes concerned with the general cooperativeness and helpfulness of others when forming beliefs about another person's trustworthiness with respect to a particular matter at hand.