Situated Trust in a Physician: Patient Health Characteristics and Trust in Physician Confidentiality

Most patients trust their physicians uniformly across several situations, which challenges prevailing perspectives on interpersonal trust that view it as situated (placed upon a specific person for a specific task within a situation). We suggest this finding is an artifact of undertheorizing about how situations shape patients’ trust. We develop claims explaining how patients’ devalued health characteristics raise situation-specific concerns. We find that the severity and chronic severity of body weight and depressive symptoms are associated with lower trust in physician confidentiality-–-the expectation that a physician uses personal health information appropriately-–but not trust for other tasks.