Trust, confidence, familiarity, and support for land‐based recirculating aquaculture facilities

Abstract

Surveys in three U.S. localities (n = 523) with proposed or existing land-based aquaculture facilities probed trust's relationship with perceived net benefits and public intentions to cooperate with siting of this novel technology. The trust, confidence, and cooperation (TCC) model posits that shared values shape willingness to be vulnerable to others (trust), while past performance shapes certainty that others will behave as expected (confidence). Trust affects confidence given moral outweighs performance information, possibly varying by familiarity. Other research suggests that trust shapes benefit and risk perceptions, which drive cooperation (defined here by potentially observable behavior: voting on siting, trying to influence government decisions directly or through citizen groups, and buying or eating facility fish). Confirmatory factor analyses suggested that a two-factor model fit the trust/confidence measures better than a one-factor model or a two-factor model without inter-factor correlation, indicating (despite a strong association of trust and confidence) that they are empirically distinct. Path analyses suggested that trust had stronger direct effects on cooperation than did confidence, reflecting the TCC notion that moral information underlying trust judgments is more influential, and stronger indirect effects through benefit-risk judgments. Model fit was better than if the benefit-risk mediator was omitted. Trust in government had a small direct effect on cooperation and confidence, but a large effect on trust in the corporation, and model fit was much worse if any of these paths was omitted. Low familiarity with the project lowered both model fit and trust-confidence association. We discuss implications for risk analysis theory and practice.

Trust and trustworthy artificial intelligence: A research agenda for AI in the environmental sciences

“…The TCC model also admits other exogenous factors, including general (interpersonal) trust. Empirically, the association between trust and confidence is high (Earle & Siegrist, 2006; Johnson & Rickard, 2023), leading to questions about whether trust and confidence can be distinguished, conceptually or practically (see Section 3.1 for further discussion of this).…”

“…NASEM, 2022a), Siegrist (2021) concludes that “trust is not an appropriate term to describe the reliance on modern technology” (p. 484). Siegrist further identifies a lack of causal research as inhibiting progress in understanding the relationship between trust and risk perception, and the distinction between trust and confidence, while acknowledging that these are hard to measure (Earle & Siegrist, 2006; Johnson, 1999; Johnson & Rickard, 2023). Causal research using validated measures might help distinguish judgments based on past performance from those based on salient value similarity and provide additional insights into how to measure these concepts.…”