Trust among people underlies many key social and economic interactions. Trust is necessary for solving complex large-scale challenges such as environmental problems, welfare provision, antibiotic resistance, and containing pandemics: many people are only willing to make sacrifices for the collective benefit if they can trust others to do the same.
The aim of INTRUST is to advance knowledge on the sources of trust among people. From previous research, we know that people’s trust in others is pronounced in societies with high-quality institutions, i.e. where the rules are clear and well-enforced, and where there is little room for corruption.
Recent research also provides evidence that good-quality institutions cause social trust to develop. However, we lack understanding of the mechanisms through which institutional quality generates social trust. Without this knowledge, the scholarly community can neither provide clear recommendations on how to correct for the negative effect of low institutional quality on trust, nor on how to avoid the negative behaviours that it underpins.
INTRUST connects knowledge from political science and economics to causally disentangle how institutional quality affects social trust, significantly advancing a key long-standing debate in social sciences on the origins of social trust. Using several novel and original designs for behavioural lab-like experiments online and in the field to study people’s reactions to varying levels of institutional quality, INTRUST will provide the first generalisable causal evidence of the mechanisms behind the effect of institutional quality on social trust.
Knowing how people react to institutional dysfunctionalities is crucial to design appropriate policy interventions and to find solutions to societal challenges that rely on social trust.
