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Trust across Disciplines

Mental attitudes in trust - Regarding sociology

It is important to study the feeling of trust focusing on what happens into an individual's mind when he trusts someone else. This feeling is similar to others, such as faith, hope, confidence and so on, but it has specific characteristics that have to be considered and investigated. Only with a strong attention to the mental attitudes involved in trust it is possible to study this concept and reach a deep and clear understanding of it.

Social scientists studied this topic from the point of view of the behaviour the trusting agent has after his feeling of trust. In this discipline, there has been also a deep analisys of the similar but different feelings, such as considering someone trustwhorty and trusting him.

Niklas Luhmann

We have to avoid confusion between familiarity and trust. Familiarity is an unavoidable fact of life; trust is a solution for specific problems of risk. But trust has to be achieved within a familiar world, and changes may occur in the familiar features of the world which will have an impact on the possibility of developing trust in human relations. Hence we cannot neglect the conditions of familiarity and its limits when we set out to explore the conditions of trust. [...]

[Luhmann proposes] a distinction between confidence and trust. Both concepts refer to expectations which may lapse into disappointments. The normal case is that of confidence. You are confident that your expectations will not be disappointed. [...] Trust, on the other hand, requires a previous engagement on your part. It presupposes a situation of risk. The distinction between confidence and trust thus depends on perception and attribution. If you do not consider alternatives (every morning you leave the house without a weapon!), you are in a situation of confidence. If you choose one action in preference to others in spite of the possibility of being disappointed by the action of others, you define the situation as one of trust. In the case of confidence you will react to disappointment by external attribution. In the case of trust you will have to consider an internal attribution and eventually regret your trusting choice. [...]

The distinction between confidence and trust depends on our ability to distinguish between dangers and risks, whether remote or a matter of immediate concern. The distinction does not refer to questions of probability or improbability. The point is whether or not the possibility of disappointment depends on your own previous behaviour. [...]

Familiarity, confidence, and trust are different modes of asserting expectations - different types, as it were, of self-assurance. However, they use self-reference in different ways. Familiarity and confidence presuppose asymmetric relations between system and environment. Familiarity draws the (asymmetric) distinction between familiar and unfamiliar fields and puts up with the familiar. The unfamiliar remains opaque. [...] Confidence, on the other hand, emerges in situations characterized by contingency and danger, which makes it meaningful to reflect on pre-adaptive and protective measures.

Russel Hardin

Hardin's conception of encapsulated trust articulates many of the essential features of [the rational] view [of trust]. A rational account of trust includes two central elements. The first is the knowledge that enables a person to trust another. The second is the incentives of the person who is trusted (the trustee) to honor or fulfill that trust. Individuals can trust someone if they have adequate grounds for believing it will be in that person's interest to be trustworthy "in the relevant way at the relevant time". This notion of trust, he observes, is not predicated on individuals' narrow contemplation of their own interests but is enfolded instead in a sophisticated understanding of the other party's interests. "You can more confidently trust me if you know that my own interest will induce me to live up to your expectations. Your trust then encapsulates my interests." [...]

Edna Ullman-Margalit

A good understanding of distrust may be a useful way of shedding additional light, even if indirectly, on the notion of trust which has been the focus of intensive research in recent years. [...]

Normal linguistic use suggests the existence of an interim zone between clear cases of trust and of distrust. Trust and distrust, while mutually exclusive, are not mutually exhaustive. That is, I cannot both trust and distrust you, at least not with respect to one and the same matter (say, with respect to writing a genuinely warm letter of recommendation for me). Yet it is entirely possible for me neither to trust nor to distrust you - with respect to the same matter or indeed in general. I may, in other words, be agnostic in the matter of trusting you. Still, if I distrust you, this surely means that I do not trust you. The converse, however, does not hold: if I do not trust you, I may actually distrust you, but not necessarily so. And what if I do not distrust you? Does this mean I trust you? Ordinary use wouldn't quite accept that.

Maj Tuomela

[Tuomela offers an analisys of the trust concept, trying to distinguish concepts that have been usually confused. In her theory, 1) trustworthiness, 2) to trust someone on the basis of an expectation of his future behaviour and 3) to trust him thanks to a relationship of mutual respect are three different degrees of the trust concept.]

To find a person trustworthy and to trust in him are distinguished from each other in that finding a person trustworthy consists of beliefs, [...] it is often the result of an evaluation of a person's character, his motives or some features of the situation, [while] trusting, in addition to beliefs, of feelings and an accepting attitude about being dependent on him. [...]

Rational social normative trust is distinguished from rational predictive "trust" by the trustor's expectation of the trustee that the trustee will intentionally act with goodwill, and not only an expectation that the trustee will do so. The preposition "of" is meant to indicate that the expectation is normative [...] The trustor's belief of his (quasi-) moral or social entitlement to be gratified by the trustee is due to his socially grounded belief that the relationship of mutual respect between himself and the trustee involves such rights in the present situation, and the trustor believes that the trustee will act with goodwill at least in part for this reason. The focus is on the relationship and not on existing norms and norm-obedient behavior in general. [...]

Predictive "trust" is not considered to be genuine trust, and can hardly be said to be trust at all, as the trustor merely predicts another person's action involving intentional gratification of the trustor on the basis of some features of the person or the situation. Either the relationship between the persons does not yield rights, on social grounds, to expect gratification or, if it does, the rights do not figure as a partial reason for the trustee's action. However, in both kinds of trust, the trustor feels comfortable being dependent on the trustee, and on the grounds of his beliefs and feelings, he has an accepting attitude concerning his dependent position.

References

Luhmann, N. (1988). Familiarity, Confidence, Trust: Problems and Alternatives. In Gambetta, D. (ed.) Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations. Electronic edition, Department of Sociology, University of Oxford. 6, 94-107

Kramer, R. (1999). Trust and Distrust in Organizations: Emerging perspectives, Enduring Questions. Annual Review of Psychology. 50, 569-598.

Ullmann-Margalit, E. (2001). Trust, Distrust and in Between. In Discussion Paper Series from Center for Rationality and Interactive Decision Theory. Hebrew Universityw, Jerusalem. Electronic version available.

Tuomela, M. (2003). A Collective's Rational Trust in a Collective's Action. In Understanding the Social II: Philosophy of Sociality, Protosociology. 18-19, 87-126. Electronic version available: this version is the next to last version of the published article. See the publisher's site for more information and for the published version.

Other perspectives on mental attitudes

This topic is studied also in psychology and computer science. You may also want to read our contribution about mental attitudes in a trusting agent, where we present a beliefs/goals architecture.