The Stranger Face Trust (SFT) questionnaire and the Imaginary Stranger Trust (IST) questionnaire are two new self-report measures of generalized trust that assess trust in real (SFT) and imaginary (IST) strangers across four trust domains. Both were designed to be objective, empirically valid, and easy to administer and score. To assess measurement validity and reliability, SFT and IST along with other common measures of social trust, sociodemographic characteristics, biographical characteristics, and a survey experiment were administered to a large representative sample of Qualtrics web-panel members ( N = 2,041). Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation models established the internal consistency, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and criterion validity of SFT and IST. Further tests revealed that SFT and IST correlate with well-established predictors of generalized trust, while other correlates like the age–trust relation were called into question. Taken together, this article shows that SFT and IST are valid and reliable instruments for the measurement of generalized trust and that common measures of generalized trust appear to be less valid and less reliable. This article ends with a discussion of the implications and directions for future research.

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Despite decades of interdisciplinary research on trust, the literature remains fragmented and balkanized with little consensus regarding its origins. This review documents how this came to be and attempts to offer a solution. Specifically, it evaluates issues of conceptualization found in the trust literature. I recommend that we move away from varieties of trustmultidimensional conceptualizations of trustand toward a single trust concept built around four essential properties: actor A's beliefs, actor B's trustworthiness, the matter(s) at hand, and unknown outcomes. I finish the article by proposing a synthetic structural-cognitive theoretical framework for investigating the causes and consequences of trust in everyday life."I believe that the most serious and important problems that require our immediate and concerted attention are those of conceptualization and measurement, which have far too long been neglected." -Hubert M. Blalock, Jr. (1979: 882)

When people form beliefs about the trustworthiness of others with respect to particular matters (i.e., when individuals trust), theory suggests that they rely on preexistent cognitive schemas regarding the general cooperativeness of individuals and organizations (i.e., social trust). In spite of prior work, the impact of social trust on relational trust-or what Russell Hardin (2002) calls trust as a three-part relation where actor A trusts actor B with reference to matter Y-is not well established. Four vignette experiments were administered to Amazon.com Mechanical Turk workers (N = 1388 and N = 1419) and to public university undergraduate students (N = 995 and N = 956) in order to investigate the relationship between social trust and relational trust. Measures of general social trust and particular social trust produced statistically equivalent effects that were positively associated with relational trust. Political trust, however, was statistically unrelated to relational trust. These results support the idea that people rely on schemas and stereotypes concerned with the general cooperativeness and helpfulness of others when forming beliefs about another person's trustworthiness with respect to a particular matter at hand.