Hazard Manager Stereotypes as Influences on Trust, Confidence and Cooperation

管理危险的组织必须得到公民足够的信任，以获得政策支持和遵守个人防护行为的建议，但信任和不信任都很难改变。体制上的陈规定型观念可能助长了这种抵制变革的行为。该项目将使用焦点小组和调查，以确定一般（政府、企业、非营利组织）和具体（政府机构、公司、倡导团体）两级三种机构类型的陈规定型属性，包括常见的陈规定型观念（例如，政府的繁文缛节;商业利润追逐;非营利的多愁善感）和更罕见的潜在属性（例如，除了减少伤害之外，该机构是否重视对权威的尊重，或纯洁和神圣）。这些答复将与具体国家组织的属性进行比较（例如，美国食品药品监督管理局[FDA]）在这三个类别中的不同危害领域（例如，食品安全、核能）。这将允许看到组织是否被评为？典型的？当他们被评定为更抽象的实体（如“政府”或“公司”）时，他们的类别具有相同的感知属性。随后的实验将评估当一个特定的组织（例如，FDA）正在管理一个危险，公民拥有特定于情况的信息-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其他影响信任的因素（例如，感觉到你与组织共享显著的价值观;感觉到危险活动或过程是“好的”还是“坏的”）来查看消息是否影响真实的情况下的合作（例如，向特定的宣传团体捐款;在特定的州购买氡测试工具包）。机构的刻板印象可能至少部分地导致了持续的（不）信任，但这种潜在的因果关系尚未得到测试;我们甚至不知道这些刻板印象是相对简单还是复杂，或者它们是否因人、机构类别或主题领域而异（例如，食品安全与氡）。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对公民和消费者关于他们将如何管理危险的看法会产生多大的影响。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，专注于说服人们，执行特定行为符合他们自己的最佳利益（例如，不管他们是否信任这个机构。相反，如果实验表明，关于组织的特定情境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特定情境，以改善组织的感知方式或合作程度（例如，采纳公众的自我保护、购买或捐赠建议）。绘制各组织在其机构类别中相对于其他组织的定位图（例如，一个公司对另一个公司），或者在它们的主题领域中的类别外的组织（即，潜在的盟友或敌人），可以被组织用来评估他们可能需要在哪里加强他们的声誉。鉴于民主中不信任的价值取决于公民对机构的充分了解，如果将这张地图张贴在公众可访问的论坛（在线或离线）上，可以帮助公民评估他们必须处理的组织，提高个人效能和（潜在的）对公民需求的机构响应。

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.