Survey reports of trust in government actually measure confidence in capacity

Evidence

In a poll reported in Business Week (17 May 1999, 8), people responded that, when looking for advice in assessing some product to be purchased, they most trust Consumer Reports, a friend’s recommendation, a news article (not an ad), and a magazine article, in that order. This is presumably what trust in government often means in the survey literature. “I trust” for some of these responses means no more than that I can rely on government or I can expect it to act in decent ways. “I trust” Consumer Reports does not mean what “I trust” my close friend means. It reduces to the French, “j’ai confiance,” I have confidence. Presumably this primarily means confidence in the capacity of these agencies to judge products, although the failure of advertisements to make the list of useful judgments suggests that at least part of the response turns on the likely motivations of the various sources. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 777

Categorization

• XREF: Corroborates the Luhmann distinction (confidence vs. trust) that the reader is already synthesizing for the project.
• SEED: An angle: how survey instruments silently conflate confidence and trust, distorting the entire public-opinion literature on political trust.