Date
12-16-2025
Department
School of Behavioral Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD)
Chair
Laura Rolen
Keywords
social trust, trustworthiness, different faiths, religion
Disciplines
Psychology | Sociology
Recommended Citation
Hogan, Angelia Theresa, "An Examination of Perceptions of Strangers' Trustworthiness: A Comparison of Religious Beliefs" (2025). Doctoral Dissertations and Projects. 7794.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/7794
Abstract
When Panikkar wrote that the “meeting of religions is an inescapable fact of today,” he was describing the very premise of this study. The continual social interactions between people of different faiths and beliefs require an understanding of both perceptions and prejudices in order to help foster trust and cooperation in a global setting. The availability of current data on unimpeded and immediate perceptions of the social trustworthiness of a photographed face on the part of people of different religious beliefs is sorely lacking. This study examined whether people with six different religious affiliations assigned different levels of trustworthiness to the same random faces in a photograph. The participants were recruited using the social media platforms Facebook and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk© (MTurk) crowdsourcing platform. A survey link that included 49 faces of people of various genders, ages, and ethnic backgrounds selected randomly from the Chicago Faces database was shown to each participant. The data collected were analyzed statistically to determine whether there were differences in the levels of social trustworthiness assigned both between one’s professed faith and within the different faiths. The results indicated that there were some statistically significant differences in social views of trustworthiness based upon reported religion. However, the data appeared to be stratified between specific groups and relatively consistent within these groups. There were no statistically significant differences in trust assignments within the groups. In addition, the study found that age, gender, and faith were all reported to play a role in the way that the participants viewed the photographs presented with respect to assignment of social trustworthiness.
