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

This is the first in a four-part series. The paper was initially presented to the Digital Sciences Initiative (DSI) at The University of Sydney on 10 April, 2024.

By © European Union, 2024, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=129920508

Part I: A matter of trust

I am going to begin with four quotes that give a sense of both the importance and the challenges of studying trust. The first is the statement of the United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, at the 76th General Assembly in 2021:

A disease is spreading in our world today: a malady of mistrust. When people see promises of progress denied by the realities of their harsh daily lives. When they see their fundamental rights and freedoms curtailed. When they see petty — as well as grand — corruption around them … And when young people see no future at all…

The people we serve and represent may lose faith not only in their Governments and institutions — but in the values that have animated the work of the United Nations for over 75 years. Peace. Human rights. Dignity for all. Equality. Justice. Solidarity. Like never before, core values are in the crosshairs.

A breakdown in trust is leading to a breakdown in values. Promises, after all, are worthless if people do not see results in their daily lives. Failure to deliver creates space for some of the darkest impulses of humanity. It provides oxygen for easy fixes, pseudo-solutions and conspiracy theories. It is kindling to stoke ancient grievances. (Guterres, 2021)

The second is from the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius. Asked by his disciple Tse-Kung about the requisites of government, Confucius observed that they are ‘sufficiency of food, sufficiency of military equipment, and the confidence of the people in their ruler.’ When asked about the significance of each, Confucius replied:

Give them enough food, give them enough arms, and the common people will have trust in you.’ Tzu-kung said, ‘If one had to give up one of these three, which should one give up first?’ ‘Give up arms.’ Tzu-kung said, ‘If one had to give up one of the remaining two, which should one give up first?’ ‘Give up food. Death has always been with us since the beginning of time, but when there is no trust, the common people will have nothing to stand on.’ (Lun Yu, no date).

The third statement is from the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, from his 1979 book Trust and Power:

Trust is only possible in a familiar world; it needs history as a reliable background. One cannot confer trust … without all previous experiences. But rather than just being an inference from the past, trust goes beyond the information it derives from the past and takes the risk of defining the future. The complexity of the future world is reduced by the act of trust … As a social order becomes more complex and variable, it tends on the whole to lose its matter-of-fact character, its taken-for-granted familiarity … Yet the very complexity of the social order creates a greater need for co-ordination and hence a need to determine the future — i.e. a need for trust (Luhmann, 2017a, p. 23).

Finally, trust was considered by the American singer-songwriter Billy Joel, in his 1986 hit A Matter of Trust:

Some love is just a lie of the heart

The cold remains of what began with a passionate start

But that can’t happen to us

’Cause it’s always been a matter of trust (Joel, 1986).

Both Guterres and Confucius identify trust in systems of governance as critical to the functioning of society, and the rise of mistrust as generating unwelcome social chaos. It is important to note that they differ upon the scale of the solution. For Confucius, as for western political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, the scale is national: trust is bound up with the legitimacy of rulers of a defined territory and the security of the state. For Guterres, the nature of the social contract addresses a common humanity and the challenge is how to renew trust in international institutions and global governance. The question of scale is one that is recurring in the literature on trust: as we move from the interpersonal and the local to the societal, how far does it “scale up”?

Luhmann and Joel differ on the specificity of relations of trust. For Luhmann, the problem of trust is one of modernity (‘the complexity of the social order’), but one that has its own temporalities and histories for different individuals and for different societies. By contrast, Billy Joel presents trust as a universal theme of successful relationships, and with that a good life. The question of who or what we put trust in is also a common theme of trust research, particularly as we move from trust in individuals to trust in institutions in increasingly complex societies.

References cited

Guterres, A. (2021, September 21). Secretary-General’s address to the 76th Session of the UN General Assembly. https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2021-09-21/address-the-76th-session-of-general-assembly.

Joel, B. (1986). A Matter of Trust. Columbia.

Luhmann, N. (2017). Trust and Power (2nd ed.). Polity Press.

Lun Yu. (no date). The Analects of Confucius.

Forward to Part 2.