From statistics to trust: Psychology in transition

Modern psychology has aimed at being a natural science. This has been difficult because psychological processes are influenced by indefinitely complex, irreversibly changing contexts. Attempting to circumvent these obstacles, one has resorted to a group level methodology yielding small statistical differences and correlations that fail to provide sufficient support for theoretical and practical advance. Turning from this “psycho-demography” to person-centered psychology involves a change from statistical analysis of group-averages to logical analyses of personal communications, and from studying causation (what leads to what?) to studying implication (what follows from what?) also called psycho-logic. Since communications depend on trust, this replaces statistics, both in research and practice. It is concluded that psychology can only be about the concrete, and that future advances may lie in developing psycho-logic in terms of semantic non-numerical computer algorithms.     

Affective commitment,trust, and the psychological contract: contributions matter,too!

ABSTRACT

Employees’ receipt of inducements is associated with trust and affective commitment, and employees pay for their inducements with their contributions (e.g., time, and physical and intellectual effort). Yet this relationship does not fully mirror events as they occur in an employment relationship where employees’ promises and delivery of inducements and contributions are ongoing, and relatively continuous. Our premise is that promising and delivering contributions may enhance or reduce employees’ trust in and commitment to the organization depending on how well they fulfill psychological needs. We tested a social exchange theory model and our alternative model. Survey results favoured our alternative model and suggested that employees’ contributions were related to trust and commitment, independent of the role of inducements. Tests of the social exchange model exhibited worse fit to the data. Breach and fulfilment results from polynomial regression and response surface analyses revealed that commitment was higher when delivered contributions equal promised contributions and declined when delivered amounts were deficient of, or exceeded, promised amounts. Employees’ promised and delivered contributions to organizations may constitute a path to their feelings of commitment, but commitment was highest when delivered contributions were within close range of promised amounts.     

Investor's Pessimistic and False Belief About Trustworthiness and Stake Size in Trust Decision1

Trust is a vital element of any society. Previous studies using trust games have provided insight into understandings of trusting behavior. However, investors' behaviors can be confounded by their risk preferences in the game, and little is known about the relationship between stake size and beliefs of others' good intentions underlying trust. We thus used a variant of the trust game and conducted two experiments to examine how stake size affects investors' beliefs about receivers' trustworthiness, with model-based analyses. We showed that, when holding all else equal, investors trusted more, but their expectations of reciprocation declined as stake size increased. However, actual receivers' reciprocation rates showed the opposite trend to investors' pessimistic beliefs. Furthermore, following previous studies in social psychology, we hypothesized that investors' social preferences (social value orientation) moderated the beliefs underlying trust, but they had no explanatory powers in investors' expectations of reciprocation. These results suggest that peoples' naive beliefs about stake size play a more important role in trust decisions than expected.     

Signaling trustworthiness: The effect of leader humor on feedback-seeking behavior

ABSTRACT

Given its capacity to cultivate a range of positive outcomes in the workplace, humor has been recognized as a valuable tool for leadership purposes. However, the theoretical understanding of leader humor remains relatively limited and the mechanism through which it influences follower outcomes has not been clearly identified. Drawing on signaling theory, we developed and empirically tested a model which delineates the relationship between leader humor and a specific follower behavior – proactive feedback seeking. We collected data from 304 employees and their respective leaders working in a large Canadian retail organization. Results of our analyses indicate that leader humor can impact subordinate feedback-seeking behavior via its influence on subordinates’ affect-based and cognition-based trust in the leader.     

Depletion manipulations decrease openness to dissent via increased anger

We investigated a potential outcome of ego depletion manipulations and an important factor behind cooperative failure: a lack of openness to others’ dissenting opinions. Across five studies in a variety of task settings, we examined the effect of depletion manipulations on openness to dissent and investigated two negative emotions as potential mediators of this process: fatigue and anger. The results demonstrated a negative effect of depletion manipulations on openness to dissent through increased anger rather than fatigue (Studies 1–5). In Studies 3 and 4, we also eliminated perceived trust towards a task counterpart as a significant mediator of the relationship between depletion manipulations and openness to dissent. These findings help clarify the nature of ego depletion manipulations and shed light on why individuals may fail to consider others’ dissenting opinions and, thus, fall short of achieving cooperation.