A Study On Influence Factors Of Generalized Trust

Generalized Trust refers to an interpersonal trust which individuals give to people without relations. Compared to a trust between people having relations, which I use the term Targeted Trust in this thesis to refer to, generalized trust has no specific relationships as its basis, that means individuals give their trust without any information about the objects. Some western researchers pointed out previous studies hadn’t paid attention to this distinction between two types of interpersonal trust. In the modern society which characterized as uncertainty and anonymity, generalized trust is becoming more and more important. Therefore, researchers had interest in the study of where generalized trust came from and offered different opinions. According to several different theories about the factors of generalized trust, this study is designed from three kinds of factors:the individual basic attitude, the diffusion of targeted trust and the sense of justice to test their effects on generalized trust.3786 samples from China General Social Survey (CGSS2010) are used to analyze the influence of three categories and five kinds of variables:optimism, targeted trust and sense of justice on generalized trust. The main statistical method is Logistic regression analysis. The results reveal that among five kinds of variables, two variables of targeted trust and one variable of sense of justice all have significant impact on generalized trust, whereas the impact of the two variables of optimism on generalized trust has disappeared after controlling the other variables.