Trust can facilitate risk-taking between individuals within organisations which is also important for military operations. We present the results of two related studies that investigate the effects of trust on risk-taking in officer cadets. The first study uses an evaluative priming task (Burns & Conchie, 2015) to assess the extent to which trust-related attitudes (e.g. towards one’s Commanding Officer) are activated automatically. The second study uses a novel variant of the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) which primes participants with trust-related attitude-objects (e.g. Commanding Officer), to investigate if automatically activated trust attitudes can change spontaneous risk-taking behaviour.
Automatically activated attitudes influence behaviours in situations when motivation / opportunity to deliberate about how to respond is low. During high tempo operations or in situations involving high mental workload (when people may not have the cognitive resources to evaluate an individual’s trustworthiness explicitly) implicit trust may lead to spontaneous risk-taking behaviours between individuals, which may facilitate team / organisational performance. In our first study, we will measure implicit trust for unit personnel in officer cadets (n = 25) at a UK university Officer Training Corps.
In our second study, we will investigate the effects of trust on spontaneous risk-taking behaviours. To do this, we have developed a novel variant of the BART that primes participants with trust-related attitude-objects (e.g. Commanding Officer), to investigate if automatically activated trust attitudes can change spontaneous risk-taking behaviour. The BART is a computer based gambling game that correlates with measures of sensation seeking, impulsivity and several real life risky behaviours like drug use and gambling. We expect that when primed with ‘high trust’ attitude-objects (determined by implicit trust scores from study 1), participants will take more risks on that BART trial, and when primed with ‘low trust’ attitude-objects, participants will take fewer risk on that BART trial.
We intend to explain our findings from the two studies in terms of the MODE model (Fazio & Olson, 2003) which describes the (trust) attitude to (risk-taking) behaviour process. We will also consider practical implications for building trust to enhance performance in military / high-hazard organisational contexts.