Two experiments examined how mock jurors’ beliefs about three factors known to influence eyewitness memory accuracy relate to decision-making (age of eyewitness and presence of weapon in Study 1, length of eyewitness identification decision time in Study 2). Psychology undergraduates rendered verdicts and evaluated trial participants after reading a robbery-murder trial summary that varied eyewitness age (6, 11, 42, or 74 years) and weapon presence (visible or not) in Study 1 and eyewitness decision length (2-3 or 30 seconds) in Study 2 (n=200 each). The interactions between participant belief about these variables and the manipulated variables themselves were the heart of this study. Participants’ beliefs about eyewitness age and weapon presence interacted with these manipulations, but only for some judgments – verdict for eyewitness age and eyewitness credibility for weapon focus. The exploratory meditational analyses found only one relation: juror belief about eyewitness age mediated the relation between eyewitness age and credibility ratings. These results highlight a need for juror education and specialized voir dire in cases where legitimate concerns exist regarding the reliability of eyewitness memory (e.g., child eyewitness, weapon presence during event, long eyewitness identification time). If erroneous juror beliefs can be corrected their impact may be reduced.

Using confirmatory factor analyses and multiple indicators per construct, we examined a number of theoretically derived factor structures pertaining to numerous trust-relevant constructs (from 9 to12) across four institutional contexts (police, local governance, natural resources, state governance) and multiple participant-types (college students via an online survey, community residents as part of a city’s budget engagement activity, a random sample of rural landowners, and a national sample of adult Americans via an Amazon Mechanical Turk study). Across studies, a number of common findings emerged. First, the best fitting models in each study maintained separate factors for each trust-relevant construct. Furthermore, post hoc analyses involving addition of higher-order factors tended to fit better than collapsing of factors. Second, dispositional trust was easily distinguishable from the other trust-related constructs, and positive and negative constructs were often distinguishable. However, the items reflecting positive trust attitude constructs or positive trustworthiness perceptions showed low discriminant validity. Differences in findings between studies raise questions warranting further investigation in future research, including differences in correlations among latent constructs varying from very high (e.g., 12 inter-factor correlations above .9 in Study 2) to more moderate (e.g., only 3 correlations above .8 in Study 4). Further, the results from one study (Study 4) suggested that legitimacy, fairness, and voice were especially highly correlated and may form a single higher-order factor, but the other studies did not. Future research is needed to determine when and why different higher-order factor structures may emerge in different institutional contexts or with different samples.

The purpose of this volume is to consider how trust research, particularly trust in institutions, might benefit from increased inter- or transdisciplinarity. In this introductory chapter, we first give some background on prior disciplinary, multidisciplinary, and interdisciplinary work relating to trust. Next, we describe how this many-disciplined volume on institutional trust emerged from the joint activities of the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation and a National Science Foundation-funded Workshop on institutional trust. This chapter describes some of the themes that emerged, while also providing an overview of the rest of the volume, which includes chapters that discuss conceptualizations, definitions, and measurement of trust; institutional trust across domains and contexts; and theoretical advances regarding the “dark” and “light” sides of institutional trust. Finally, we conclude with some thoughts about the future of and potential promises and pitfalls of trust as a focus of interdisciplinary study.