Trust but Verify: The Role of Cognitive Skills & the Media Environment on Trust

• In Event: Voters and Communication in Advanced Democracies

Abstract

When citizens trust or mistrust government actors, under what circumstances do they make mistaken judgements? Most studies have focused on why citizens fail to trust benevolent actors. But it is also important to ask why citizens mistakenly trust malevolent actors. These questions are increasingly relevant in the context of democratic backsliding and a drift towards authoritarianism.

Part I of the paper sets out our theoretical framework. In democratic societies, it is usually assumed that trust is essential for societal and political cooperation, therefore if trust is good, more trust must always be better. The notion of trustworthiness serves as an important correction for this assumption. The paper adopts Hardin’s (2006) notion that rational trust implies the perception that someone or something is trustworthy: the person or institution is judged to have benevolent intentions towards me. As a default position, however, it would be irrational to trust actors where I have no reliable evidence for their likely behaviour towards me, such as strangers or malevolent leaders who lie. Thus, it would be foolishly naive to take the word of demagogues at face value, or to believe kompromat and dezinformatsiya on social media intending to cause harm.

Two types of errors can arise, not just one. Most concern in Western democracies has arisen from Type I errors, where cynical citizens reject trust in benevolent actors. But there is also room for genuine concern about Type II errors, especially but not exclusively in the context of authoritarian leaders or authoritarian regimes, where citizens should not be too naively trusting of malevolent actors, such as believing propaganda from state-controlled media. Instead, in any polity, we theorize that ordinary citizens should ideally be sceptical and vigilant, evaluating reliable evidence for the performance of governing actors, trusting actors which serve the public interest while penalizing those failing to do so. The concept reflects the Russian saying: trust but verify (Доверяй, но проверяй). Where healthy scepticism slides into outright cynicism, however, and where trust in actors is deserved, remains to be determined empirically.

Why are citizens prone to error? Judgement in politics is always boundedly rational. We theorize that it is subject to two broad forces. Simon (1990:7) argues that human behaviour is ‘shaped by a scissors whose two blades are the structure of task environments and the computational capabilities of the actor’. On the computational side, we expect citizens’ cognitive capacity for information processing to vary by factors such as their education, time availability, attention, and prior beliefs. In terms of the information environment, we expect the information environment to vary cross-nationally due to levels of press freedom and media pluralism.

Part II in this paper describes the empirical data and research design. We use new cross-national time-series data from a wide range of societies in the World Values Surveys/European Values Surveys to explore how far, and under what conditions, perceptions of institutional trust are related to the trustworthiness of national governments, benchmarked by objective indices of policy performance. Part III compares national macro-level data to establish the size of type I and II errors. Part IV focuses on several factors potentially explaining these errors, including both lack of cognitive capacity at individual-level, derived primarily from education, and also the information environment, measured by indices of press freedom and mass communications in societies.

Authors

• Pippa Norris, Harvard University and University of Sydney

• Will Jennings, University of Southampton

• Gerry Stoker, University of Southampton