Hazard Manager Stereotypes as Influences on Trust, Confidence and Cooperation

危害管理者的刻板印象对信任、信心和合作的影响

• 批准号: 1427039
• 负责人: Branden Johnson
• 金额: $ 24万
• 依托单位: Decision Science Research Institute
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-08-01 至 2018-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1427039&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Hazard; Manager; Stereotypes; Influences; Trust

Organizations managing hazards must be trusted enough by citizens to gain policy support and compliance with recommendations for personal protective behavior, yet both trust and distrust are hard to change. Institutional stereotypes may contribute to this resistance to change. This project will use focus groups and a survey to identify stereotypical attributes of three institutional types at both general (government, business, nonprofits) and specific (government agency, corporation, advocacy groups) levels, including both common stereotypes (e.g., government red tape; business profit-chasing; nonprofit sentimentality) and rarer potential attributes (e.g., whether the institution values respect for authority, or purity and sanctity, in addition to reducing harm). These responses will be compared to attributes of specific national organizations (e.g., Food and Drug Administration [FDA]) in these three categories in varied hazard domains (e.g., food safety, nuclear power). This will allow for seeing whether organizations rated as being ?typical? of their category have the same perceived attributes as when they are rated as more abstract entities (such as "government" or "corporation"). A subsequent experiment will assess how much stereotypes affect trust, confidence, and cooperation when a specific organization (e.g., FDA) is managing a hazard, and a citizen has situation-specific information-not just stereotypes-to help determine whether the organization is trustworthy. Experiments will then test alternative messages based on either stereotype manipulation or other factors affecting trust (e.g., feeling that you share salient values with the organization; feelings that the hazardous activity or process is "good" or "bad")to see if the messages affect cooperation in real cases (e.g., donations to specific advocacy groups; purchases of radon test kits in a specific state). Stereotypes of institutions may be at least partly responsible for perseverance of (dis)trust, yet this potential causal link has not been tested; we do not even know whether these stereotypes are relatively simple or complex, or whether they vary across people, institutional categories, or topical domains (e.g., food safety versus radon). The practical implications of this research should be to help government, business, and nonprofit managers understand how much influence their actions will have on citizens' and consumers' views of how they will or do manage hazards. If stereotypes beyond the control of managers dominate trust judgments and cooperation, then managers can abandon attempts to build trust and focus on convincing people that it is in their own best interest to perform a specific behavior (e.g., test for radon) regardless of whether they trust the institution. If the experiments show instead that situation-specific information about the organization swamps any effects of its institutional stereotype, then managers will know to emphasize their specific situation in order to improve how the organization is perceived or how much cooperation (e.g., adoption of recommendations for self-preservation, purchases, or donations) it gets from the public. Mapping of how organizations are positioned relative to others in their institutional category (e.g., one corporation versus another), or to extra-category organizations in their topic domain (i.e., potential allies or enemies), could be used by organizations to evaluate where they might need to strengthen their reputations. Given the value of distrust in a democracy depends upon citizens being well-informed about institutions, this map if posted in publicly accessible forums (online or offline) could help citizens evaluate organizations with which they must deal, raising personal efficacy and (potentially) institutional responsiveness to citizen demands.

管理危害的组织必须得到公民足够的信任，以获得政策支持并遵守个人防护行为的建议，但信任和不信任都很难改变。制度刻板印象可能会加剧这种对变革的抵制。该项目将利用焦点小组和调查来确定三种机构类型在一般（政府、企业、非营利组织）和特定（政府机构、公司、倡导团体）层面的刻板印象属性，包括两种常见的刻板印象（例如政府繁文缛节） ；商业追逐利润；非营利性情感）和更罕见的潜在属性（例如，除了减少伤害之外，机构是否重视对权威的尊重，或纯洁性和神圣性）。这些响应将与不同危险领域（例如食品安全、核电）这三个类别中特定国家组织（例如食品和药物管理局 [FDA]）的属性进行比较。这将允许查看组织是否被评为“典型”？其类别中的实体具有与被评级为更抽象实体（例如“政府”或“公司”）时相同的感知属性。随后的实验将评估当特定组织（例如 FDA）管理危害时，刻板印象对信任、信心和合作有多大影响，并且公民拥有特定情况的信息（而不仅仅是刻板印象）来帮助确定该组织是否值得信赖。然后，实验将根据刻板印象操纵或影响信任的其他因素（例如，感觉您与组织共享显着价值观；感觉危险活动或过程是“好”或“坏”）来测试替代消息，以查看这些消息是否有效影响真实案例中的合作（例如，向特定倡导团体捐款；在特定州购买氡气测试套件）。机构的刻板印象可能至少在一定程度上导致了信任（不信任）的持续存在，但这种潜在的因果关系尚未得到检验；我们甚至不知道这些刻板印象是否相对简单或复杂，或者它们是否因人、机构类别或主题领域（例如食品安全与氡气）而异。这项研究的实际意义应该是帮助政府、企业和非营利组织的管理者了解他们的行为会对公民和消费者对如何管理危害的看法产生多大的影响。如果管理者无法控制的刻板印象主导了信任判断和合作，那么管理者可以放弃建立信任的尝试，而专注于说服人们执行特定行为（例如，氡气测试）符合他们自己的最佳利益，无论他们是否愿意信任该机构。相反，如果实验表明，有关组织的具体情况信息淹没了其制度刻板印象的任何影响，那么管理者就会知道强调他们的具体情况，以改善组织的认知或合作程度（例如，采纳关于组织的建议）。自我保护、购买或捐赠）它从公众那里获得。组织可以使用映射组织相对于其机构类别中的其他组织（例如，一个公司与另一家公司）或相对于其主题领域中的类别外组织（即潜在的盟友或敌人）的定位来评估他们的位置可能需要加强他们的声誉。鉴于民主中不信任的价值取决于公民对机构的充分了解，如果将这张地图发布在可公开访问的论坛（在线或离线）上，可以帮助公民评估他们必须与之打交道的组织，从而提高个人效率和（潜在的）机构效率对公民需求的响应。