Trust and control are often portrayed as opposing forces in a hydraulic relationship. Across six preregistered experiments (total N = 4086) conducted in Australia, South Africa, the UK, and the US, we demonstrate that this relationship is context-dependent rather than universal. We examined how verification monitoring—a subtle form of control—affects trust in communal sharing (CS) versus market pricing (MP) relationships. Participants found monitoring more acceptable in MP than CS relationships (Experiment 1), and its introduction shifted perceptions of CS relationships toward a more market-like orientation (Experiments S1-S2). From the trustee's perspective, monitoring reduced trust in both relational contexts; from the trustor's view, it only undermined trust in CS relationships (Experiment 2). These patterns generalized across cultures, held across different trust levels (Experiment 3), and extended to behavioral choices (Experiment 4). Our findings challenge the universality of the hydraulic model, showing that while control mechanisms undermine trust in communal contexts where they violate norms of unconditional support, their effects in market contexts depend on whose perspective is considered—trustors or trustees.
Kuzminska et al. (Wed,) studied this question.