5.2.1. Effectiveness of Government Trust Manipulation
The results revealed that the score of the participants in the high-trust group (M = 5.32, SD = 1.39) and the score of the participants in the low-trust group (M = 4.40, SD = 1.59) significantly differed (t (158) = 3.90, p < .01), which shows that manipulating participants’ trust in government in this experiment was effective. The high-trust group was coded as a dummy variable (“1”), and the low-trust group was coded as a dummy variable (“0”).