Factorial Surveys in Social Psychology: Comparing (Dis-)Trust in Outgroups in Germany and Spain

The objective of the paper is to deepen the understanding of what determines social trust and distrust in outgroups using an experimental design in two european cities, Bilbao (Spain) and Cologne (Germany). The concept of social trust is very relevant for social ciences and is very important connector with the concept of democracy and “good governanace”, as it’s the “glue of social life”. The rapidness, with which the changes are produced in the composition of our population, in the migratory activity, religious and interethnic diversity etc. immediately generate growing heterogeneity in our environment regarding the variety of groups that compose nowadays our society. This plurality of origins, religions and cultures that increasingly form part of our society has consequences for the nature and implications of social trust, and more specifically, for the social distrust.

Our main objectives are:

1.  To measure social trust and distrust, focusing in characteristics of those people who tend to trust and distrust others.

2.  To analyze and depict the characteristics of those individuals and groups who are subject of trust and distrust in our society.

3. To compare the levels of trust and the effect of the different correlates in two different cities which present clear differences in terms of exposure to outgroups and lenght of the contact with outgroups in recent history. In order to measure this a factorial survey was carried out. The method is ideal to measure and decompose the effects of specific characteristics of those who trust and those to be trusted.