Two Methods to Measure the Level of Trust of Americans and Japanese: A Cross-Cultural Study

Interpersonal trust of Japanese and Americans was investigated using two methods: a General Trust Questionnaire and a scenario judgments task, in which participants were asked to rate how strongly they trust a target person in a series of vignettes. Participants were grouped into two conditions, with the target person being either an in-group member or an out-group member. The purposes of this study were to investigate whether Americans have a higher level of trust than Japanese do, to test the in-group hypothesis which predicts that the difference in trust between the two conditions is greater for Japanese than for Americans and the dialectical thought hypothesis which predicts that the correlation between the General Trust Questionnaire score and the scenario judgments task score would only occur in the Americans' data. The study, which was conducted with American (n = 105) and Japanese (n = 102) participants, found no differences in the trust level between Americans and Japanese in both methods. The results did not support the in-group hypothesis, but did support the dialectical thought hypothesis, indicating that Japanese are more dialectical in judging how they trust others.