Social Models of Trust
Social science uses two main approaches to modeling trust:
Temporal aspect: Trust has been considered to have a temporal aspect since Aristotle stressed that friendship cannot exist without trust and that trust needs time. In the twentieth century, Niklas Luhmann viewed trust as a representation of the future. This is similar to the belief we hold when reasoning inductively that after experiencing an historical pattern of behavior, similar behavior can be expected in the future. For example, even without knowing the laws of physics, we trust that the sun will shine tomorrow in the same way that we have seen in the past.
Risk aspect: Social scientists have strongly stressed that risk is a central aspect of trust. For example, Luhmann believed that trust is an investment that involves risky preliminary outlay, where we accept risk in order to reduce the complexity of what we think about the world. In a similar vein, Georg Simmel believed that trust is an intermediary state between ignorance and knowledge, and the objective of gaining trust may fail [Simmel 1968]. Again, more recently, Nissenbaum stressed that trust involves vulnerability [Nissenbaum 1999].
In addition, other interesting properties of trust have been suggested, including these:
Trust is necessary to allow us to function in the world. Luhmann believes that “[t]rust is the glue that holds everything together in social life” [Luhmann 1979]. This is because it reduces the complexity of how we think about the world around us so that we are only then capable of action and decision-making.
Trust is a learning process. In the personal sphere, trust is an historical process of individuals learning to trust others without having to give unlimited trust. However, according to Luhmann, we do not really understand the process [Luhmann 1979].
On a larger scale, social order is replaced by legal order. If you look in a dictionary, it is very probable that some of the definitions of trust will mention law, and this is no accident. Indeed, one reason why trust is necessary is because we do not have the resources on a personal level to analyze all the information that we need during our working life. Therefore, as societies become more advanced, such delegation increasingly requires trust in functional authorities and institutions, particularly in the area of knowledge (and technology). However, as mentioned above, if these institutions or powerful individuals (such as politicians) let down the people who trust them, there is the risk of a big change of attitude toward them. This leads to the following point.
Trust may be irrational. Many social scientists believe that trust is not a matter of reason and is unpredictable in that it involves processes that cannot be calculated in advance. In fact, there is a difference of opinion regarding whether giving precise reasons generates extra trust or has the opposite effect.
A Cross-Disciplinary View of Trust
Various people have tried to carry across the understanding gained via social scientists' models of trust to other domains. For instance, Rousseau and his associates have attempted to provide a cross-disciplinary model of trust [Rousseau et al. 1998]. They identify common elements of trust across disciplines, arguing that the definitions are variants of the same theme and that highlighting that trust is a process rather than a static event. Trust is a process because it develops over time and is dynamic insofar as multiple perspectives are necessary to explain different aspects of trust. For example, according to the economic view, trust is a cause, whereas the sociological perspective classifies it as an effect. From a social psychological perspective, in contrast, trust is considered as an interaction of the two. Although different scholars may particularly focus on one level of analysis (such as the individual, group, society, or firm level), this does not necessarily mean that they disregard the others.
The implication of this, according to Rousseau and colleagues, is that trust comes in different forms in different relationships. Even in the same relationship, the bandwidth of trust will vary depending on what development stage the relationship is in. This bandwidth ranges from deterrence-based trust, over calculus-based trust and relational trust, to institution-based trust.
In other words, a multi-level analysis is important in order to understand the complex phenomenon of trust.