Understanding Consumer Financial Trust Across National Levels of Interpersonal Trust

Trust plays a pivotal role in consumer decision-making processes, especially in complex areas such as financial services. This study analyzes how general financial trust (GFT)—understood as consumers’ overall perception of the trustworthiness of financial institutions—is influenced by national levels of interpersonal trust (IPT) and how this interaction affects key psychological factors in the relationship between customers and financial service providers. Drawing on theories of cognitive consistency, attribution, and prospects, our results indicate that in national markets where the IPT level is low (vs. high), consumers are (a) more inclined to take GFT into account as a factor that directly influences their anticipated outcome (i.e., expectations) and perceived outcome (i.e., quality and satisfaction) and (b) less inclined to take GFT into account as a contextual moderator of the relationships between expectations, quality, and satisfaction. Our study is based on two surveys with bank customers in Sweden (n = 6049) and Spain (n = 1050), respectively. In this study, Sweden represented a national market with relatively high-level IPT (i.e., 63.8% of citizens agreed with the statement ‘most people can be trusted’), whereas Spain was a national market with low-level IPT (i.e., 32.8% of citizens agree with the statement ‘most people can be trusted’).