BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Personality and Social Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1600551
The Effect of Leadership, Emotional Stability, and Expertise Marker on Swift Trust in First Aid: A Text-Vignette Study
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden
- 2Center for Disaster Medicine and Traumatology, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden
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Autocratic leadership and emotional stability have been found to evoke more swift trust in a first aid context. However, it is still unknown how markers of emergency response expertise affect swift trust in this context. The current study aims to partially replicate the effect of autocratic leadership and emotional stability and investigate the effect of an expertise marker on swift trust in first aid. Swift trust was measured in text-vignettes of a first aid scenario with a 2x2 design (autocratic leadership and emotional stability versus democratic leadership and emotional instability, and presence versus absence of emergency response expertise marker). The results show an interaction effect of leadership behavior and emotional stability with the expertise marker. This suggests that people giving first aid while wearing an expertise marker are expected to show clear and direct leadership and emotional stability for increased swift trust. The positive effect of autocratic leadership and emotional stability on swift trust was also replicated. Future work should investigate more diverse first aid scenarios that are found in real-life first aid.
Keywords: Swift trust, First Aid, Autocratic leadership, emotional stability, expertise marker
Received: 10 Apr 2025; Accepted: 29 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Brodin, Fernlund and Prytz. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Wilhelm Brodin, wilhelm.brodin@liu.se
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