The Study On Old Adults’ Trust Level To Strangers And Influencing Factors

With increasing age, older adults’social connectedness has decreased. Communicated with strangers, however, still act as an important role in their daily communication. Numerous incidents of theft and cheating reported by mass media have wildly affected older adults’trust for strangers, which seriously affected the older adults’life satisfaction and increased expenditure in successful aging. Thus, exploring the characteristics of trust to the stranger can better older adults’life satisfaction.The specific context in present is as follow:Firstly, we utilized the free association to explore the characteristics of the trust to strangers. Secondly, we employed an open-ended questionnaire to investigate the influencing factors of older adults’trust of strangers. Thirdly, typically trust conditions have utilized to evidence older adults’crisis of confidence in trust to strangers. Fourthly, for confirming the influencing factors (such as participants’experiences, type of strangers, and the strangers’age) of trust to strangers, the behavior experiment has been used. The results in present study are as follow:(1) The expressions in the strangers among older adults significantly integrate in negative. Cognitive subject, emotive subject, personality of object and role of object are acted as main impression of strangers among older adults, especially in cognitive evaluation. Specially, Further, older adults labeled strangers as unacquaintance, unknown, distrust, worry to be cheated, ignorance, cautions and so on.(2) Typical trust condition questionnaire has been utilized to confirm that older adults might not trust strangers. Results showed that:the overall level of older adults’ trust to strangers is negative; older adults’trust to strangers is almost significant on different gender、different age period and income monthly, specifically, the male tend to trust strangers compare to female; Trust to strangers declined with increased age; The more older adult achieved, the higher trust to strangers; and participant’s education level and engagement are not significant with trust to strangers.(3) Six main influencing factors of older adults’ trust to strangers, they are the strangers’ characteristics, participant’s experience, risk evaluation, participant’s personality, context of trust and similarity between strangers and participants. Conclusively, the strangers’ characteristics acted as the most significant importance in trusting strangers, and participant’s experience took second place. The game of trust has employed and we found that:Participant’s experience、age-related characteristics of participants or strangers and type of strangers have got significantly influence on trust to strangers. All in all, the results suggested that trust in the elderly is lower than the young on the overall level (except the trust to child-strangers).Specifically demonstrated that different types of experience are significant in older group but not in young group; both positive experience and negative experience show a significant difference to control group;Young people tend to trust strangers in this order:older adults, children and young adults, and older people incline to trust children, followed by older adults and young adults. To be specific, whether older adults or young adults, they tend to trust the consistent trusting picture evaluated by them compare to those pictures evaluated inconsistently.