Trust (social science)

Trust is the belief that another person will do what is expected and is built through repeated consistency. It brings with it a willingness for one party to become vulnerable to another party, on the presumption that the trustee will act in ways that benefit the trustor. In addition, the trustor does not have control over the actions of the trustee; however, those actions influence the trustor's positive, neutral, or negative evaluations regarding the trustworthiness of the trustee. Scholars distinguish between generalized trust, which is the extension of trust to a relatively large circle of unfamiliar others, and particularized trust, which is contingent on a specific situation or a specific relationship.
As the outcome of trust is uncertain and depends on what one chooses to believe, the trustor can only evaluate and develop expectations based on the trustee’s actions. Such expectations are formed with a view to the motivations of the trustee, dependent on their characteristics, the situation, and their interaction. The trustor’s risk perception of failure or harm to themselves stems from the uncertainty of the trustee’s behavior.
In the social sciences, the subtleties of trust are a subject of ongoing research. In sociology and psychology, the degree to which one party trusts another is a measure of belief in the honesty, fairness, or benevolence of another party. The term "confidence" is more appropriate for a belief in the competence of the other party. A failure in trust may be forgiven more easily if it is interpreted as a failure of competence rather than a lack of benevolence or honesty. In economics, trust is often conceptualized as reliability in transactions. In all cases, trust is a heuristic decision rule, allowing a person to deal with complexities that would require unrealistic effort in rational reasoning.

Types

Types of trust identified in academic literature include contractual trust, competence trust and goodwill trust. American lawyer Charles Fried speaks of "contractual trust" as a "humdrum" experience based on the voluntary acceptance of contractual obligations: for example, people keep appointments and undertake commercial transactions. "Competence trust" can be defined as "a belief in the other's ability to do the job or complete a task"; this term is applied, for example, in relation to cultural competence in healthcare. In working relationships, "goodwill trust" has been described as "trust regarding the benevolence and integrity of counterpart".
Four types of social trust are recognized:

Generalized trust, or a dispositional trait geared towards trusting others, is an important form of trust in modern society, which involves much social interaction with strangers. Schilke et al. refer to generalized and particularized trust as two significant research streams in the sociology of trust.
Out-group trust is the trust a person has in members of a different group. This could be members of a different ethnic group, or citizens of a different country, for example.
In-group trust is placed in members of one's own group.
Trust in neighbors considers the relationships between people with a common residential environment.
Sociology

Sociology claims trust is one of several social constructs; an element of the social reality. Other constructs frequently discussed together with trust include control, confidence, risk, meaning and power. Trust is attributable to relationships between social actors, both individuals and groups. Sociology is concerned with the position and role of trust in social systems. Interest in trust has grown significantly since the early 1980s, from the early works of Luhmann, Barber, and Giddens. This growth of interest in trust has been stimulated by ongoing changes in society, known as late modernity and post-modernity.
Sviatoslav contended that society needs trust because it increasingly finds itself operating at the edge between confidence in what is known from everyday experience and contingency of new possibilities. Without trust, one should always consider all contingent possibilities, leading to paralysis by analysis. Trust acts as a decisional heuristic, allowing the decision-maker to overcome bounded rationality and process what would otherwise be an excessively complex situation. Trust can be seen as a bet on one of many contingent futures, specifically, the one that appears to deliver the greatest benefits. Once the bet is decided, the trustor suspends his or her disbelief, and the possibility of a negative course of action is not considered at all. Hence trust acts as a reducing agent of social complexity, allowing for cooperation.
Sociology tends to focus on two distinct views: the macro view of social systems, and a micro view of individual social actors. Views on trust follow this dichotomy. On one side, the systemic role of trust can be discussed with a certain disregard to the psychological complexity underpinning individual trust. The behavioral approach to trust is usually assumed while actions of social actors are measurable, allowing for statistical modelling of trust. This systemic approach can be contrasted with studies on social actors and their decision-making process, in anticipation that understanding of such a process will explain the emergence of trust.
Sociology acknowledges that the contingency of the future creates a dependency between social actors and, specifically, that the trustor becomes dependent on the trustee. Trust is seen as one of the possible methods to resolve such a dependency, being an attractive alternative to control. Trust is valuable if the trustee is much more powerful than the trustor, yet the trustor is under social obligation to support the trustee.
Modern information technologies have not only facilitated the transition to a post-modern society but have also challenged traditional views on trust. Information systems research has identified that people have come to trust in technology via two primary constructs: The first consists of human-like constructs, including benevolence, honesty, and competence, whilst the second employs system-like constructs, such as usefulness, reliability, and functionality. The discussion surrounding the relationship between information technologies and trust is still in progress as research remains in its infant stages.

High- and low-trust societies

Influence of ethnic diversity

Several dozen studies have examined the impact of ethnic diversity on social trust. Research published in the Annual Review of Political Science concluded that there were three key debates on the subject:

Why does ethnic diversity modestly reduce social trust?
Can contact reduce the negative association between ethnic diversity and social trust?
Is ethnic diversity a stand-in for social disadvantage?

The review's meta-analysis of 87 studies showed a consistent, though modest, negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust. Ethnic diversity has the strongest negative impact on neighbor trust, in-group trust, and generalized trust. It did not appear to have a significant impact on out-group trust. The authors present a warning about the modest size of the effect, stating, "However, the rather modest size of the implies that apocalyptic claims regarding the severe threat of ethnic diversity for social trust in contemporary societies are exaggerated."

Psychology

In psychology, trust is believing that the trusted person will do what is expected. According to the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, development of basic trust is the first state of psychosocial development occurring, or failing, during the first two years of life. Success results in feelings of security and optimism, while failure leads towards an orientation of insecurity and mistrust possibly resulting in attachment disorders. A person's dispositional tendency to trust others can be considered a personality trait and as such is one of the strongest predictors of subjective well-being. Trust increases subjective well-being because it enhances the quality of one's interpersonal relationships; happy people are skilled at fostering good relationships.
Trust is integral to the idea of social influence: it is easier to influence or persuade someone who is trusting. The notion of trust is increasingly adopted to predict acceptance of behaviors by others, institutions, and objects such as machines. Yet once again, perceptions of honesty, competence and value similarity are essential.
There are three forms of trust commonly studied in psychology:

Trust is being vulnerable to someone even when they are trustworthy.
Trustworthiness are the characteristics or behaviors of one person that inspire positive expectations in another person.
Trust propensity is the tendency to make oneself vulnerable to others in general. Research suggests that this general tendency can change over time in response to key life events.

Once trust is lost by violation of one of these three determinants, it is very hard to regain. There is asymmetry in the building versus destruction of trust.
Research has been conducted into the social implications of trust, for instance:

Barbara Misztal attempted to combine all notions of trust. She described three functions of trust: it makes social life predictable, it creates a sense of community, and it makes it easier for people to work together.
In the context of sexual trust, Riki Robbins describes four stages. These consist of perfect trust, damaged trust, devastated trust, and restored trust.
In the context of information theory, Ed Gerck social functions such as power, surveillance, and accountability.
From a social identity perspective, the propensity to trust strangers arises from the mutual knowledge of a shared group membership, stereotypes, or the need to maintain the group's positive distinctiveness.

Despite the centrality of trust to the positive functioning of people and relationships, very little is known about how and why trust evolves, is maintained, and is destroyed.
One factor that enhances trust among people is facial resemblance. Experimenters who digitally manipulated facial resemblance in a two-person sequential trust game found evidence that people have more trust in a partner who has similar facial features. Facial resemblance also decreased sexual desire for a partner. In a series of tests, digitally manipulated faces were presented to subjects who evaluated them for attractiveness within a long-term or short-term relationship. The results showed that within the context of a short-term relationship dependent on sexual desire, similar facial features caused a decrease in desire. Within the context of a long-term relationship, which is dependent on trust, similar facial features increased a person's attractiveness. This suggests that facial resemblance and trust have great effects on relationships.
Interpersonal trust literature investigates "trust-diagnostic situations": situations that test partners' abilities to act in the best interests of the other person or the relationship while rejecting a conflicting option which is merely in their self-interest. Trust-diagnostic situations occur throughout everyday life, though they can also be deliberately engineered by people who want to test the current level of trust in a relationship.
A low-trust relationship is one in which a person has little confidence their partner is truly concerned about them or the relationship. People in low trust relationships tend to make distress-maintaining attributions whereby they place their greatest focus on the consequences of their partner's negative behavior, and any impacts of positive actions are minimized. This feeds into the overarching notion that the person's partner is uninterested in the relationship, and any positive acts on their part are met with skepticism, leading to further negative outcomes.
Distrusting people may miss opportunities for trusting relationships. Someone subject to an abusive childhood may have been deprived of any evidence that trust is warranted in future relationships. An important key to treating sexual victimization of a child is the rebuilding of trust between parent and child. Failure by adults to validate that sexual abuse occurred contributes to the child's difficulty in trusting self and others. A child's trust can also be affected by the erosion of the marriage of their parents. Children of divorce do not exhibit less trust in mothers, partners, spouses, friends, and associates than their peers of intact families. The impact of parental divorce is limited to trust in the father.
People may trust non-human agents. For instance, people may trust animals, the scientific process, and. Trust helps create a social contract that allows humans and domestic animals to live together. Trust in the scientific process is associated with increased trust in innovations such as biotechnology. When it comes to trust in social machines, people are more willing to trust intelligent machines with humanoid morphologies and female cues, when they are focused on tasks, and when they behave morally well. More generally, they may be trusted as a function of the "machine heuristic"—a mental shortcut with which people assume that machines are less biased, more accurate, and more reliable than people—such that people may sometimes trust a robot more than a person.
People are disposed to trust and to judge the trustworthiness of other people or groups—for instance, in developing relationships with potential mentors. One example would be as part of interprofessional work in the referral pathway from an emergency department to a hospital ward. Another would be building knowledge on whether new practices, people, and things introduced into our lives are indeed accountable or worthy of investing confidence and trust in. This process is captured by the empirically grounded construct of "Relational Integration" within Normalization Process Theory. This can be traced in neuroscience terms to the neurobiological structure and activity of a human brain. Some studies indicate that trust can be altered by the application of oxytocin.