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Trust across Disciplines

Laws and authorities in trust - Our socio-cognitive approach

Laws and authorities that are able to make these rules be respected have a similar function to contracts: they can provide a background where trust can start.

What researchers of computer science achieved with their studies about Trusted Third Parties and other control management systems is useful but it shouldn't be considered a remedy for lack of trust: with the introduction of an authority or of a corpus of laws, the trust problem is not solved, if not made more complex.

An agent that doesn't trust his partner can certainly ask for some guarantees from an authority, but with this intervention he has to face another uncertainty, which is trust in the authority itself.

There is indeed a shift of the trust problem. The presence of a third party doesn't eliminate the need of trust but it merely shifts the attention of the agents towards different kinds of trust, even more complex and specific.

The solutions provided by other disciplines seem naive because they do not consider the cognitive aspects of trust.

References

If you want to read more on these topics, read Trust as a three party relationship page in our Trust theory, where you can find downloadable articles too.

Other perspectives on laws and authorities

These topics are studied also in economics, sociology and computer science.