Abstract
Sources of trust in hazard managers have been studied in detail over many years, but reasons for attributing responsibility for hazard system performance have not. This study examines the role of factors in the salient value similarity (SVS) and intuitive detection theorists (IDT) models of trust, as well as awareness of problems and freedom to act to deal with those problems (AWFR), in predicting both trust and attributions of responsibility. The context used is a hypothetical contamination of food by Salmonella bacteria, either accidental or intentional, and these judgments are assessed for food producers, processors, "watchdogs" (government), sellers, preparers, and consumers. Results show that trust is primarily positively predicted by an index combining SVS and IDT items, with AWFR playing a trivial role of varying sign. However, initial attributions of responsibility are positively predicted by AWFR, with SVS/IDT as a secondary and largely negative predictor. These relative roles persist in logistic regressions of final attributions of responsibility, which control for the initial attributions. Modest differences occur across hazard managers and contamination cause in both trust and responsibility attributions, but these do not affect the relative influence of SVS, IDT and AWFR variables.