The antecedent role of personal environmental values in the relationships among trust in companies, information processing and risk perception

Trust and risk perception are important issues for industries such as petrochemical companies, typically considered 'less trustworthy' because of the hazards associated with their activities. In this context, individual's trust in companies may have influence on information processing mode that individual adopts to reach a judgement such as risk perception associated with industrial hazards. We take the heuristic-systematic theory (HSM) as the model for processing information about industrial risk, with trust in companies as its antecedent and risk perception as its consequence. However, this process may be influenced by factors such as personal specific values. This paper analyses, to our knowledge for the first time, the antecedent role of personal values towards environmental issues in the HSM of information processing. The model was tested using data from interviews with 992 residents in an area of the province of Castell (Spain) close to a petrochemical complex. Structured equation models were used to analyse the data. The results demonstrate the proposed relationships. The main contribution of this paper is the corroboration of the direct and indirect effects of personal environmental values on the variables that make up the trust in companies-HSM of information processing-risk perception sequence. Finally, we recommend that the companies of the petrochemical complex consider the frank, open and bidirectional communication with the residents as the key element to break the association among pro-environmental values, distrust in the companies and perception of the risk.