Affiliation with different religions can have different effects on practitioners’ trust in state institutions and in social actors. Based on a survey of 3,740 residents in Hong Kong in 2021, we examine the relationship between religious affiliation and believers’ trust in the political authorities in Beijing and Hong Kong and in civil actors in the city. We find that affiliation with traditional Chinese religions and Eastern religions has a positive and significant effect on believers’ trust in the political authorities, whereas belief in Western religions does not have such an effect. Affiliation with Western religions, however, has a stronger positive and significant effect on interpersonal trust and on tolerance for unconventional behaviour. These findings shed light on the interaction between the government and religious groups in Hong Kong after 1997.

How do ordinary citizens view labor unions? The importance of public opinion about unions has rarely been highlighted in the contemporary literature on labor politics. Using five waves of the World Value Surveys on South Korea, this article suggests that public confidence in labor unions is significantly affected by individuals’ interpersonal trust, conditional on their perception of the political representation of labor. Unlike those with high levels of trust, low-trust individuals view unions as an agent seeking their exclusionary interests at the expense of the rest of the society. The difference between high- and low-trust individuals’ confidence in labor unions is more pronounced when a liberal, rather than a conservative, government is in power because of the public perception that labor interests are already well-represented by the liberal government and union functions are redundant in such a circumstances. The empirical findings are found robust to alternative theoretical arguments and empirical techniques.

This article calls for a sociological understanding of the importance of trust to aged care. It connects existing theories of trust to empirical evidence from gerontology and nursing research. Trust is defined as a response to and management of social vulnerability. It is argued this makes trust a fundamental concept for understanding human service and social care institutions, including aged care. In light of Australia's Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, as well as generational shifts in consumer expectations and care ethics, the article highlights four distinct yet interrelated forms of trust: interpersonal, institutional, organisational and public trust. All of these forms are shown to be critical in conceptualising and evaluating the perceived trust deficit facing contemporary aged-care systems, and existing evidence shows how these forms of trust can reinforce, conflict and misalign with each other. Efforts to rebuild trust in aged care at an organisational and institutional level should ensure mechanisms facilitate rather than hinder the formation of interpersonal trust relations between individual service users, their families and aged care staff. Broader social policy reforms must also consider and address the way cultural understandings of ageing, and media representations of aged care, have diminished the public's trust in the sector, and how the cycle of scandals, reviews and piecemeal reforms contributes to this.

How does single-party dominance influence interpersonal trust? We draw on evidence from trust games played by more than 2,000 subjects in South Africa, where, since Apartheid, race-based social enmity has persisted under democratic competition characterized by single-party dominance. We find that partisan-based trust discrimination is most pronounced for those who identify with the main opposition party and is driven by strong distrust of rival partisans. These findings underscore how electoral competition, in general, shapes trust across party lines and suggests one-sided competition, in particular, has asymmetrical effects between parties in dominant party systems. Moreover, this study provides additional evidence regarding the relative weights of trustworthiness stereotypes tied to partisanship and race.

Although many studies have focused on how trustees’ particular or single social identity affects their trustworthiness, only one study has revealed that trustees with multiple social identities are judged as more trustworthy than those with a single identity. However, the study could not show how trustworthiness systematically changes with an increasing number of social identities. The present study addressed this issue and further explored in two experiments whether the growth trend of trustworthiness was particular to social identities. Experiment 1 showed that when the number of trustees’ social identities increased, they were judged as more trustworthy. Experiment 2 found that trustees with more social identities were judged as more trustworthy, whereas the amount of trustees’ personal physical information did not have that large effect in facilitating trustworthiness. These results demonstrate the special influence of social identity information on trust or trustworthiness.

This study examines the effect of supervisors’ Confucian values on interpersonal trust, interpersonal justice, and information sharing in the context of South Korean workers, using multilevel analysis. We also investigate the moderating roles of blood, regional, and school ties (BRST) among their relationships. A survey was conducted with 46 supervisors and 210 subordinates from South Korean manufacturing companies. Our empirical findings indicated that supervisors’ Confucian values were positively associated with the interpersonal trust, interpersonal justice, and information sharing of subordinates. Contrary to our expectation, the BRST had no significant moderating role in the relationship between supervisors’ Confucian values and interpersonal trust, interpersonal justice, and information sharing of subordinates. Our study contributes to organisational behaviour and psychology by highlighting the significance of societal values such as Confucian values in understanding an organisational member's attitude and behaviour in the East Asian region.

Despite the pivotal role that both power and interpersonal trust play in a multitude of social exchange situations, relatively little is known about their interplay. Moreover, previous theorizing makes competing claims. Do we consider our relatively more powerful exchange partners to be less trustworthy, as rational choice reasoning would suggest? Or do more complex psychological mechanisms lead us to trust them more, as motivated cognition reasoning implies? Extending the latter approach, we develop and empirically test three hypotheses on the interrelation between perceptions of interpersonal trust and power. According to the status value hypothesis, individuals are more likely to befriend those whom they or others perceive as powerful. The status signaling hypothesis states that the friends of people one perceives as powerful will also be seen as powerful. According to the self-monitoring hypothesis, high self-monitors are more likely than low self-monitors to befriend those they or others perceive as powerful. We use multiplex stochastic actor-based models to analyze the co-evolution of trust and power relations among n = 49 employees in a Dutch Youth Care organization. Data covers three waves of a longitudinal sociometric network survey collected over a period of 18 months in the years 2009–2010. In general, we find some support for all three hypotheses, though the effects are weak. Being one of the first organizational field studies on the co-evolution of power and trust, we conclude with discussing the implications of these findings for the study of social exchange processes.