Data for: Responsibility as the Door Opener towards Trust: How Powerholders Construe and Express their Power Impacts Others’ Willingness to Trust Them.

Powerholders make decisions that impact others’ lives. To be effective, powerholders need those with lower power to trust them—often without the chance to establish a good interpersonal relationship beforehand. Yet, societal developments in many countries suggest that willingness to trust powerholders is eroding; this makes the (re)establishment of trust a pressing though potentially difficult endeavour. What makes it likely, then, that people are willing to spontaneously trust a powerholder they barely know? We examined the role of powerholders’ expression that they see (i.e., cognitively construe) power as a responsibility (vs. an opportunity). Doing so, the present work examines the consequences of unknown powerholders’ construal of power from observers’ perspective for the first time and connects it with research on trust. We reasoned that people would be more willing to trust an unknown powerholder who recognizes and expresses their responsibility (vs. opportunity) as a powerholder. Five preregistered studies (N = 1,196) support this prediction for willingness to trust and a downstream effect on powerholder choice in a trust-relevant context. The findings highlight how powerholders’ construal of power affects observers and show that powerholders can promote others’ willingness to trust them by expressing a sense of responsibility (vs. opportunity). Implications for powerholders’ communication in times of distrust and populism are discussed.

权力持有者（powerholders）的决策会对他人的生活产生影响。为了有效履职，权力持有者需要位阶较低的群体对其产生信任，而双方往往并无机会在事前建立良好的人际联结。然而，诸多国家的社会发展态势显示，民众对权力持有者的信任意愿正在日渐式微；这使得重建信任成为一项紧迫却颇具难度的任务。那么，究竟是什么因素能让人们愿意自发地信任一位几乎素未谋面的权力持有者呢？本研究考察了权力持有者表达其从认知层面将权力建构为责任（而非机遇）的情况所发挥的作用。基于此，本研究首次从观察者视角出发，探究未知权力持有者对权力的建构所产生的影响，并将这一议题与信任研究建立关联。我们推论，相较于表达权力为机遇的权力持有者，人们会更愿意信任那些认可并表达自身作为权力持有者应承担责任的未知权力持有者。五项预先注册的研究（总样本量N=1196）证实了这一预测：该效应既体现在信任意愿层面，也体现在信任相关场景下的权力持有者选择这一后续效应中。本研究结果揭示了权力持有者对权力的建构如何影响观察者，并表明权力持有者可通过表达责任意识（而非机遇意识）来提升他人对自身的信任意愿。本文还探讨了在信任危机与民粹主义盛行的时代，该研究结果对权力持有者沟通策略的启示意义。