Time for Trust? Scale and relationality in understanding trust relations between people, technologies and institutions

Part 2: Trust and trustworthiness

Trust is a term with many definitions. One useful definition is provided by the historian Geoffrey Hosking, who defines trust as:

Attachment to a person, collective of persons or institution, based on the well-founded but not certain expectation that he/she/they will act for my good … [and] the expectation, based on good but less than perfect evidence, that events will turn out in a way not harmful to me (Hosking, 2014, p. 28).

Hosking’s definition is useful as it captures two key elements of trust. One is that it has to entail uncertainty, and hence risk. To be trusting is to expose one being vulnerable to the actions of others, and the possibility of trust being betrayed. The second is that it is different to faith or belief: the expectations associated with trust are not simply the product of an individual’s worldview or belief system, but on reasonably well-founded expectations that the other party can be trusted, and tat to commit to a trust relationship is likely to be beneficial.

The academic literature diverges on what is seen as the starting point for understanding trust. Economists such as Russell Hardin pick up on the insight of Adam Smith that the operation of markets and expansion of the division of labour requires a preparedness to cooperate in order to advance mutual self-interest (Tullock, 1985). From this starting point, Hardin proposes that trust at the macro level of societies builds from the micro choices made by rational individuals: trust is thus a three-part relationship where ‘A trusts B to do, or in relation to, X’ (Hardin, 2006, p. 19). In this conception, each party has an interest in trusting the other, so that ‘the potentially trusted person has an interest in maintaining a relationship with the truster, an interest that gives the potentially trusted person an incentive to be trustworthy’ (Hardin, 2006, p. 26). Importantly, it follows that a moral disposition towards trustworthiness is not the primary driver of behaviours that promote trust, but rather that it is behaviour that is of mutual benefit to both the trustor and the trustee over time — what Hardin terms ‘encapsulated interest’ — primarily drives trust between individuals and, by extension, in society (Hardin, 2002).

By contrast, the sociological literature tends to take society and social relationships as the starting point for an understanding of trust. Barbara Misztal identifies ‘trust [as] an aspect of all social relationships … [and] social relations and the obligations inherent in them are mainly responsible for the production of trust’ (Misztal, 1996, pp. 19, 21). Niklas Luhmann (2017) framed trust as a social mechanism for managing complexity and anticipating the future, in societies where familiarity and direct interactions make it more difficult to apprehend the motivations of others.

Both Misztal and Luhmann are drawing upon the classic sociological accounts of how individuals come to be bound to a social order, as developed by Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Georg Simmel. In asking “How is society possible?”, Georg Simmel observed that an individual in a society is both a person and the bearer of a social role (e.g., a merchant, a teacher, an artist, a politician, etc.), and is thus both a human subject and a “social individual.” Moreover, each individual experiences the society in part as something that is external to them — the legal system, for instance, exists independently of the individuals that are subject to it (Möllering, 2001; Simmel, 1910). From Max Weber, we derive the observation that there is an intermediate level of trust between that which individuals have in one another, and trust in a society or a system, and that is trust in the institutions of a society. As trust is placed in both individual institutions and in an institutional order, there is interdependency in trust relationships between individuals, institutions, and society as a whole (Nau, 2005; Weber, 1978).

The definition of trust raises the related question of trustworthiness. The question of whether trustworthiness is a condition of trust among individuals is debated. Katherine Hawley (Hawley, 2019) has argued that trust is demonstrated through both the commitment and capability to act in ways that can be relied upon by others over time, and hence requires trustworthiness on the part of such actors. Niklas Luhmann observed that what he termed ‘trust in trust’ was not dependent upon the motivations of individuals involved with social institutions:

Whether one is a member or outsider, one trusts large organised systems which process goods or data, although one knows that the objectives of these systems are not the goals of the people who work in them. Rather, one knows that everyone concerned in them must be motivated by complex, prone-to-failure and not readily visible detours to produce four-fruit jam, insurance notices, or whatever (Luhmann, 2017, p. 76).

The other major issue arising with trust is that is socially embedded yet its operations are largely invisible. Luhmann famously observed that ‘without trust we cannot get out of b of a morning’ (Luhmann, 2017, p. 4). We are social beings whose interdependent relations with one another require that extend trust to others in order to complete the most menial of tasks. Yet determining how it is significant can remain elusive. Bernd Blöbaum points out that ‘Trust is not visible and difficult to describe … Trust exists, so it is something tangible. But at the same time trust remains abstract’ (Blöbaum, 2021, p. 3), while Jon Elster has identified trust as ‘a specific causal pattern that can be recognised after the event or rarely foreseen’ (Elster, 1993, p. 13). It is the absence of trust or breaches of trust that are far more likely to draw attention to its significance than everyday forms of trusting behaviour. It is significant that the UN Secretary-General should draw attention to the importance of trust in the context of the perceived growth of mistrust. ‘Normal’ trust is not analytically interesting.

References cited

Blobaum, B. (2021). Some Thoughts on the Nature of Trust: Concept, Models and Theory. In Trust and Communication: Findings and Implications of Trust Research (pp. 3–28). Springer.

Elster, J. (1993). Political Psychology. Cambridge University Press.

Hardin, R. (2002). Trust and Trustworthiness. Russell Sage Foundation.

Hardin, R. (2006). Trust. Polity.

Hosking, G. A. (2014). Trust: A History. Oxford University Press.

Mollering, G. (2006). Trust: Reason, Routine, Reflexivity. Elsevier.

Nau, H. H. (2005). Institutional, evolutionary and cultural aspects in Max Weber’s social economics. Papers in Political Economy, 49(2), 127–142.

North, D. (1994). Economic Performance Through Time. American Economic Review, 84(3), 359–368.

Tullock, G. (1985). Adam Smith and the Prisoners’ Dilemma. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 100, 1073–1081.

Weber, M. (1978). Economy and Society (2 vols.) (8th ed.). University of California Press.

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