Comparing Single-Item and Multi-Item Trust Scales: Insights for Assessing Trust in Project Leaders

The purpose of this research is to provide researchers and leaders with a reliable and up-to-date comparison between a single-item and a multi-item trust scale, enabling effective assessment of team members' trust in their leaders. The aim of the study is to investigate whether a single-question scale is as reliable as a multi-item questionnaire in measuring trust. An additional goal is to provide researchers with insights and conditions for effectively using single or multiple measures to assess trust in leaders, considering factors like reliability and effectiveness. After conducting a comprehensive literature review, data were collected from 101 project members in Brazil using a survey methodology. The respondents were asked to provide feedback regarding their leaders, specifically project managers, and factor analysis was then employed to test the single-item and multi-item measures of trust. The advantages and disadvantages of each approach are discussed. The findings of our study demonstrate that both single-item and multi-item scales of trust should be utilized to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the trust construct. Single-item questionnaires can reduce survey length, improve respondent friendliness, and increase participant willingness. On the other hand, multi-item questionnaires enable researchers to analyze latent variables that contribute to an overall variable, but they cannot isolate data for each of those constructs. The results show that both measures are reliable, providing researchers and professionals with insights into the benefits and drawbacks associated with each method. Consequently, this research equips researchers and project professionals with valuable information for selecting the appropriate measurement tool.

Primates chunk simultaneously-presented memoranda

Though much research has characterized both the behavior and electrophysiology of spatial memory for single targets in non-human primates, we know much less about how multiple memoranda are handled. Multiple memoranda may interact in the brain, affecting the underlying representations. Mnemonic resources are famously limited, so items may compete for "space" in memory or may be encoded cooperatively or in a combined fashion. Understanding the mode of interaction will inform future neural studies. As a first step, we quantified interactions during a multi-item spatial memory task. Two monkeys were shown 1-4 target locations. After a delay, the targets reappeared with a novel target and the animal was rewarded for fixating the novel target. Targets could appear either all at once (simultaneous) or with intervening delays (sequential). We quantified the degree of interaction with memory rate correlations. We found that simultaneously presented targets were stored cooperatively while sequentially presented targets were stored independently. These findings demonstrate how interaction between concurrently memorized items depends on task context. Future studies of multi-item memory would be served by designing experiments to either control or measure the mode of this interaction.