Trust or not: Heuristics for making trust-based choices in HR management

The present two studies examine how the participants (i.e., 150 managers) make trust-based employee selection in hypothetical situations, based on five cues of trustworthiness derived from previous surveys. In Study 1, each executive participant is presented with a pair of candidates with different cue profiles so that the choice would favor one of them based upon each of the four following heuristics: Franklin's rule, likelihood expectancy, take-the-best (TTB), and minimum requirement (MR). Study 2 adopting a within-subject design jointly compares the four heuristics. The results show that simple heuristics (MR and TTB) outperform the more complex strategies (Franklin's rule and likelihood expectancy) in their predictive accuracy. The MR heuristic, a heuristic tallying the frequency of passes against a set of minimal rather than optimal or satisfactory requirements, performs even better than the TTB heuristic, particularly when the number of the cues identified as MRs is small.