关键词: 信任, 文化, 量化研究, 质性研究

Abstract: Trust is a complex social and psychological phenomenon which the related studies emerged in 1960s. With the development of globalization and the cultural integration, the interpersonal trust among different ethnic individuals who have different cultural backgrounds becoming more and more complex. Researchers began to focus on the role of culture on trust building in their studies recently. Some researchers believed that trust is a cultural embedding phenomenon. The establishing and maintaining of it depends on the particular social structures and cultural context. The purpose of this article is to describe and summarize the studies of trust, which includes the study perspective sand methodologies. We hope it can deep our understanding of cultural differences on trust and provide some new ideas for the future research. Trust is mostly defined as a positive expectation toward another person’s behavior though there is no a universally accepted definition. Individuals of different cultures display significant differences in the general trust level, the way of establishment of trust, type of trust and the repair of trust. Generally speaking, the western have a higher general trust than the Eastern. In trust building, the Western always adopt the calculation rules and evaluating the ability of the partner which can promise their benefit maximizing. However, predictions, reasonable and transformation are always as the main way in Eastern which included the factor of sentiment. Different model of extraction cues; different social and cultural context, cultural norms and cultural transition are the main reason which lies of the difference. The method of combination of qualitative analysis and quantitative data were always used in the cross-cultural study. Specifically, questionnaires, the card sorting and in-depth interview combination and "board game" approaches are the most popular ones. These methods can avoid the bias of the understanding of trust and to further gain meaningful results. Though the researchers had paid attention to the influence of culture difference on trust, most of them are focused on the description of it and few of the indigenous study, the specific culture icons of trust. Several directions of the future studies: 1) embodied the indigenous concept of trust; there is different meaning of trust in difference culture that the indigenous concept of trust is necessary in the relevant studies. 2) To explore the specific culture icons in trust building such as face, Renqing, Guanxin in China 3) the influence of cultural transition on trust which mean that the changeable of trust in different culture context from the longitude perspective and 4) the mixing trust of people with different cultural background with the globalization.

Key words: trust, culture, qualitative methods, quantitative methods