Trust between strangers constitutes a fundamental underpinning for well-functioning markets. Nevertheless, trusting behaviour is still poorly understood. Different lines of enquiry have focused on different behavioural determinants of trust at the microeconomic level, often using laboratory experiments with students. This focus, however, has produced two parallel literatures that appear difficult to reconcile. Existing examinations of drivers of behavior have generally focused on a few motivations in isolation, and/or used heterogeneous measurement methods to capture the different drivers. We propose a fully general model that aims at capturing all possible drivers of trust in our setup. To make such a model viable, we also propose a new measurement method that allows us to decompose trust step by step in a uniform setup. We then take our modelling and measurement setup to representative population samples in two countries, and investigate how respondents act when paired with an opposite from their own versus the other country. Given that we experimentally manipulate the characteristics of the tasks used to measure the behavioural drivers of trust, as well as the pairing in the representative samples, we can draw unambiguously causal inferences on the drivers of trust. This promises to yield original new insights that will go substantially beyond the state of the art in the literature.