GoodWork Paper 53: Trustworthiness in Youth:

Author(s): Angie L Kim

Editor(s): Howard Gardner, Series Editor

Media: Paper

Description: In this paper, I explore youth conceptions of trustworthiness. I draw on qualitative interviews conducted with 20 young Americans, ages 15 to 19, from the Greater Boston area and Maine. The subjects represent a subset of participants in the GoodWork® Project‘s study of Trust and Trustworthiness. Researchers have conducted 113 interviews with 60 youth participants to date, probing their conceptions of trust and trustworthiness in the form of person-centered and dilemma interviews. Using interview data, I present a three-part analysis to address the questions of 1) how youth conceptualize trustworthiness; 2) how youth assess the trustworthiness of others; and 3) how youth assess their own trustworthiness. The findings reveal that trustworthiness takes on moral meaning in the lives of today‘s youth. The informants discussed trustworthiness primarily in terms of fulfilling expectations of honesty, loyalty/commitment, and freedom from judgment. Yet, despite the moral nature of these expectations, the majority of youth view the establishment of trustworthiness as an instrumental quality of trusting relationships rather than as a good in itself. When assessing the trustworthiness of others and themselves, youth also require reputation, performance, or appearance-based evidence. For appearance-based evidence in particular, youth expressed little reliance on visual cues and, surprisingly, more often cited the use of other behavioral cues in real-life and hypothetical trust scenarios. Finally, the findings reveal an intimate connection between youth conceptions and assessments of trustworthiness: throughout the interviews, youth cited the same types of expectations in their explanations of how they define and assess trustworthiness. In a concluding discussion, I touch on the contributions of the study to the literature; the utility of its protocols; and implications for how one might foster appropriate trustworthiness in youth.