Q: What is the research question?
A: How do intuitive and deliberate trust evaluations shape public trust in planning systems?
Q: What does that actually mean?
A: We want to understand more about how people process information (including experiences, feelings, facts, etc.) to judge whether or not planning systems are trustworthy. Some processing happens automatically, like when you come up with the answer for: 2 + 2 = ? And some processing is very deliberate, like when you sit down and make a pros and cons list about a decision. We want to understand how these automatic and deliberate processes interact to shape trust in planning.
Q: How will you try to answer the research question?
A. This study asks members of the public and Local Authority planners to participate in up to three activities to help us learn more about how automatic and deliberate processing shape trust in planning.
| Automatic Processing | Deliberate Processing |
| An Implicit Association Test (IAT): a computer-based word sorting game | An Explicit Association Test (EAT): in this case, a fancy term for a survey A Q-Sort: a ranking activity where you sort a set of statements into order based on how much you agree or disagree with them |
Q: Why does trust matter in planning?
A: The broad consensus in planning trust literature is an ongoing crisis of trust in the planning system. The benefits of trust in planning are well-documented, and include collaboration and cooperation among others. Low trust on the other hand impedes these, often resulting in social and financial cost.
Q: What’s special about this research approach?
A: Trust is recognised as a complex and layered concept involving both rational and emotional components. However, research to date has not explicitly investigated the relationship between emotional and rational drivers of trust in planning. There has also been virtually no exploration about how implicit (automatic) cognitive processes inform trust evaluations in planning systems, or application of decision or cognitive theory. This research aims to address these gaps by using a dual-process approach, which means exploring both the automatic and deliberate cognitive processes.
This approach aims to provide a more robust exploration of how people make trust judgements about planning, and how the planning system might learn and adapt to become more trustworthy.
Q: Can I participate?
A: If you live in one of our 6 study locations (below), we would love to have you as part of this research!
Click your location below to get started!
Public Trust in Planning 