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Trust across Disciplines

Let's play around trust

Many authors approached trust from many points of view, through many disciplines and academic domains, thus giving birth to many useful observations and even theories.

We are trying to organize this huge corpus of contributions and kinds of research: together with our attempt to provide a complete and coherent theory about trust and its related topics (that we reported in the following map under the name "Socio-cognitive approach"), we are inviting expert researchers to play with us and contribute to this map for trust across disciplines. The purpose is to clarify the trust concept and its applications: by reporting the principal contributions on the subject matter, we can hopefully see what researchers achieved and what is still missing to understand.

This is of course a work in progress waiting for your contributions: below you can find the map as we built it so far. If you have objections ("I believe you misinterpreted this author's thought"), suggestions ("Why don't you add this discipline or this topic to your map?"), integrations ("I think you should include this contribution of mine") or other comments ("You'd better to give up!"), please let us know.

Browse the map by topics and disciplines

Within any cell you can find some of the main researchers that wrote about one or more of the topics related to trust. Click to read the different approaches developed by these authors.

The contributions presented in the linked pages are ordered by years of publication and are condensed in brief accounts, which we hope are not too short to be misleading. The linked pages present also a list of references we used to summarize the contributions.

Browse the map by authors (under construction)

Click on any author to see a brief account of his/her theory about trust or related topics.

Robert Axelrod Michael Bacharach Bernard Barber Suzanne Barber Roger Bons Marilynn Brewer Nancy Buchan Geert Bouckaert Jean Camp Robert Cialdini James Coleman Rachel Croson Patha Dasgupta Robert Demolombe Morton Deutsch Frank Dignum

B.J. Fogg Eric J. Friedman Francis Fukuyama Diego Gambetta David Good Russel Hardin Martin Hollis Christian D. Jensen Joonoo Kim Roderick Kramer Ko Kuwabara Olli Lagerspetz Ronald Lee Niklas Luhmann Yosi Mass

Gary Miller Helen Nissenbaum Pippa Norris Onora O'Neill John Orbell Elan Pavlov Robert Putnam Paul Resnick J. S. Rosenshein Jordi Sabater Jean-Marc Seigneur Sandip Sen Onn Shehory Howard Shrobe Munindar Singh

Giovanni Sartor Carles Sierra Paul Slovic Piotr Sztompka Yao-Hua Tan Zvi Topol Maj Tuomela Edna Ullmann-Margalit Eric M. Uslaner Steven Van de Walle Mark Warren Oliver Williamson Toshio Yamagishi Pinar Yolum Bin Yu Richard Zeckhouser

Download the map

You can download a complete version of this map where every researcher has been put into a cell with a brief account of his/her theory about trust or a topic relevant to trust. Please remind this is a work in progress so consider the downloadable document not definitive. Check the online map for further updates and dowload the map again.

Download the map 128 KB DOC (last revised 05/10/2005)

Acknowledgements and references

This map for the trust among disciplines is edited by Filippo Ulivieri. The most precious contributions and the first ideas for organizing the literature about trust and related topics came from Roderick Kramer's article about trust in organizations that helped regarding economics and sociology and from Stephen Paul Marsh's essay that presents useful sources for the psychological part of the map.

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

Marsh, S. P. (1994). Formalising Trust as a Computational Concept. PhD thesis, Department of Computing Science and Mathematics. University of Stirling.