Trust in Contemporary Society最新文献

{"title":"The Experience of Trust: Its Content and Basis","authors":"J. Barbalet","doi":"10.1163/9789004390430_003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004390430_003","url":null,"abstract":"The idea that trust is a perennial and core concern within social relations between persons is supported in commentaries by the frequently quoted statement, first published in 1900, that ‘Without the general trust that people have in each other, society itself would disintegrate’ (Simmel 1978: 178–79). The context of this statement is a discussion of the relationship between persons and a particular social artifact, namely money. Simmel’s proposition claims that the social effectiveness of money cannot be based on ‘rational proof or personal observation’ but rather must be founded on ‘trust’. Indeed, at the time of Simmel’s writing the term ‘trust’ typically referred to a form of corporate governance, as when property is held in trust, and the relationship indicated by Simmel would have been better translated as ‘confidence’ rather than ‘trust’. Indeed, to draw on sources such as Simmel – who was writing at the turn of the twentieth century – masks the fact that social science research interest in trust is relatively recent, beginning in the late 1970s. This last proposition is supported by the findings of a Google Scholar search for the term ‘trust’ by decade from 1900, which reveals that up to 1950 the scholarly literature on trust predominantly refers not to interpersonal relations of support and cooperation, as the term is widely understood today, but rather to corporate trusts and anti-trust legislative measures. This pattern begins to change, however, from the 1950s through to the 1970s when a different understanding of trust emerges in the scholarly literature through the publications of social psychologists interested in interpersonal trust (Rotter 1967) and pursuing such themes as trust and suspicion (Deutsch 1958), trust and surveillance (Strickland 1958), trust and the F-scale (Deutsch 1960), and so on, reflecting the concerns and dispositions of the post-World War ii period. During the following decade, 1970–80, management researchers began to turn their attention to trust. A landmark text of this literature is Zand (1972), whose focus on ‘Trust and Managerial Problem Solving’ raised problems that continue to occupy the management literature. It is only by the 1980s that trust becomes established as a theme firmly located in sociological research, encouraged by Luhmann’s (1979) essay and Barber’s (1983) short monograph, and marked by the revisions","PeriodicalId":140910,"journal":{"name":"Trust in Contemporary Society","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127207363","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Trust in Habit: A Way of Coping in Unsettled Times","authors":"B. Misztal","doi":"10.1163/9789004390430_005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004390430_005","url":null,"abstract":"With the re-conceptualization of modernity in terms of high levels of risk, complexity and uncertainty, trust has come to be seen as the essential asset in the unsettled times without which we can make no decisions and take no initiatives. More generally, trust is a fundamental resource, as with trust societies flourish and ‘when trust is destroyed, societies falter and collapse’ (Bok 1979: 26), thus it is the important condition of societal well-being. Presently, the growing demand for trust is accompanied by the growing deficit of trust. The current breakdown of trust is evident all over the world; it is observable in many Western political systems (Hosking 2014), it is noticeable among many industrialized nations (Sasaki 2016), there is empirical evidence of the erosion of trust in professions on the global scale (Drezner 2017) and the growing distrust of facts is reported around the world (Greenfield 2017). As the erosion of trust has reached a new global level, the loss of trust in established institutions is particularly evident; for example, in the United States, where people’s trust in Congress fell from 42 percent in 1973 to 7 percent in 2014. Americans have also lost confidence in unions, public schools, organized religion, business, healthcare, police and media; in 2016, a Gallup poll found that only three in ten Americans trusted mass media to accurately report the news (Drezner 2017: 23–5). The noticeable decline of the trust levels in the contemporary world, together with the continuous demand for it, calls for searching for new ways of regaining the feelings of continuity, security and strength to face change. In other words, as ‘we are doomed more and more to trust under complex conditions’ (Sloterdijk 2016: 161), we need to debate how to manage the discontinuity, risk and change without having ‘to combine trust with alarm systems’ (Sloterdijk 2016: 162). This paper asserts that one of the ways to address the issue of trust deficit should start with the appreciation of the habit’s capacity to reinforce trust. While realizing that habit is still often seen as a very old-fashioned notion connected with such ideas as tradition, irrationality, reproduction and passivity, it focuses on trust’s links with habit and the habit’s plasticity (Bernacer, Lombo","PeriodicalId":140910,"journal":{"name":"Trust in Contemporary Society","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130992714","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Uncertainty and the Economic Need for Trust","authors":"B. Nooteboom","doi":"10.1163/9789004390430_006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004390430_006","url":null,"abstract":"By way of introduction I start with some known features of trust that are relevant to the present chapter. Trust pricks up its ears when expectations are disappointed. That may be due to an accident that is no-one’s fault. Expectations can be broken due to inattention, lack of commitment, lack of competence or outright cheating. One does not automatically know which cause of broken expectations is at play. There is causal ambiguity, and this is part of the uncertainty or risk of trust. Especially the cheating opportunist will claim some mishap. This implies the crucial importance of openness for trust. If something is about to go wrong, one should not hide it but inform the partner of the imminent problem, pledge help to minimize the damage, and to come up with proposals, for after the crisis, of how one will prevent such problems from occurring in the future. That is trustworthy conduct. Openness is also a crucial part of dealing with risk and uncertainty. Such openness by the trustee concerning his errors must be earned by the trustor, in extending the benefit of the doubt when something goes wrong, and give the trustee the opportunity to explain and make amends. It is also wise for the trustor to be sufficiently open about what one fears, in a relationship, to give the partner the opportunity to take measures that eliminate the fear, give assurances. I want to note in passing that I have little confidence in surveys of generalized trust, in comparison between cultures. Trust is too diverse for that. Among other things, there is the well-known distinction between competence trust and intentional trust. The first concerns the competence to act according to agreement or expectations, intentional trust concerns the intention and commitment to do so to the best of one’s competence. I give an example. Many years ago I was involved in an investigation into the trust of Dutch citizens in the police. The outcome was that they have considerable intentional trust, here trust in the integrity, incorruptibility of the police, but much less competence trust, here the competence of catching criminals. Count your blessings.","PeriodicalId":140910,"journal":{"name":"Trust in Contemporary Society","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124656438","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Cross-National Study of Criteria for Judging the Trustworthiness of Others before a First Meeting","authors":"M. Sasaki","doi":"10.1163/9789004390430_011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004390430_011","url":null,"abstract":"Modernization, with its attendant migration to predominantly urban communities, has brought about profound change in a nearly endless number of social circumstances. One such circumstance is the increasingly frequent need to deal with strangers. This lies at the root of a fundamental change in the structure of interpersonal interactions and relationships. And here, in the overarching context of trust, we need to study the impacts and nature of these profound changes, toward a more thorough understanding of trust, distrust, and trustworthiness. That is, if one anticipates an imminent meeting with a stranger, what does one use to assess the trustworthiness of this stranger? Giddens (1990: 80), for instance, points out that “in many urban settings, we interact more or less continuously with others whom we either do not know well or have never met before...”. Marková, Linell, and Gillespie (2008: 17) have stated “Modernization has brought out not only liberty but since it has led to fragmentation of roles and of individuals, it has created the necessity of dealing with strangers”. Cook, Hardin and Levi (2005: 194) have noted: “As globalization has taken hold and interconnectedness across continents has increased dramatically, citizens everywhere have become more wary of the stranger in their midst”. Gillespie (2008: 287)1 goes on to explain that there is increasing interaction with strangers, meaning that “we must perceive people in terms of categories, social positions, and group memberships”. Clearly this has major implications for trust and distrust.","PeriodicalId":140910,"journal":{"name":"Trust in Contemporary Society","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132189483","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Trust in Transition: Culturalist and Institutionalist Debate Reflected in the Democratization Process in the Czech Republic, 1991–2008","authors":"M. Sedláčková, Jiří Šafr","doi":"10.1163/9789004390430_008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004390430_008","url":null,"abstract":"Democracy is more than just a well-built institutional system. Even a democracy which relies on functional institutions and on good systemic conditions, such as rule of law, a working bureaucracy and economic performance, would be merely an empty shell if citizens did not believe in the democratic regime and actively support it. At the beginning of the 1990s, Ralf Dahrendorf outlined the timeline for the transition to democracy and freedom for postcommunist countries as follows: political or constitutional changes can be made in 6 months, economic reforms over 6 years, and solid democratic foundations, in the form of an active civil society in 60 years (Dahrendorf 1991: 92). This has come under much criticism from various sides – from those pointing to an excessively long period of civil society formation to those who have denied the importance of civil society for the functioning of the democratic system. Over a quarter of a century later, we are privileged to be able to take a look at this “laboratory of democracy” and, in the case of one of the post-communist countries, assess the state of democracy, focusing primarily on the roots of support for the regime and its stability, and on the functioning of civil society. The democratic transition in Central and Eastern European countries has again raised the question of establishing a democratic system and of the conditions necessary for its stable functioning. On the one hand, there are those who claim that democracy is primarily a system of institutions. By introducing institutions, adopted from advanced democracies, democracy can be created","PeriodicalId":140910,"journal":{"name":"Trust in Contemporary Society","volume":"255 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123245514","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What Do Survey Measures of Trust Actually Measure?","authors":"John M. Brehm, M. Savel","doi":"10.1163/9789004390430_013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004390430_013","url":null,"abstract":"Nearly thirty years after Coleman’s seminal work on trust (1990), diverse scholarly disciplines still devote a lot of attention to the idea that trust, broadly construed, is an important concept to understand social interaction, political support, and even general wealth and prosperity.1 In Coleman’s discussion, two self-interested individuals, truster and trustee, each have something to gain or lose: the former by making herself vulnerable to the actions of another, the latter by finding herself unable to win the unguarded belief in mutually beneficial action. “Trust”, according to Coleman, is an instrumental interchange among the actors. But the far more common understanding of “trust” is not the instrumental interchange, but a more diffuse sense of “generalized trust”. This chapter supports the idea of generalized trust, but will also note that there are significant problems in the ways that we have typically assessed generalized trust in surveys due to response sets and mood. Fortunately, we see feasible, though perhaps costly, remedies to these biases. Quite a great deal of research would concur with Coleman that trust is fundamentally an instrumental interchange between actors who know one another. Some very strong evidence about instrumental trust comes from experimental contexts, especially in economics (Kreps 1990; McCabe, Rassenti, and Smith 1996); some from interview studies in anthropology (especially Ensminger and Henrich 2014); and some from very specialized studies of trust within specific social contexts including of Congress (Bianco 1994), within local bureaucracies (Brehm and Gates 2008), within Federal bureaucracy (Miller and Whitford 2016), and of the law (Tyler 2001). Perhaps the most prominent empirical work on trust comes from large scale surveys of populations. In these surveys, trust appears to be in a near catastrophic state of decline, where trust in government has fallen from high levels of support in the 1960s to bottom-scraping lows. In much of this work, the idea of “trust” is not explicitly the instrumental interchange between actors, but","PeriodicalId":140910,"journal":{"name":"Trust in Contemporary Society","volume":"75 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130989115","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Trust in the Moral Space","authors":"P. Sztompka","doi":"10.1163/9789004390430_004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004390430_004","url":null,"abstract":"Philosophy and social theory have drawn many portraits of a human being: homo politicus, homo economicus, homo faber, homo ludens. Sociology has its own image: homo sociologicus (Ralf Dahrendorf 1968) based on four assumptions: relational existence, ascription of meaning, existential uncertainty, and normative regulation. The fundamental truth about the people is that they always live in some relations to other people: with others, next to others, for others – but never alone. From birth to death we live in the inter-human space, surrounded by more or less “significant others” (George H. Mead 1964). The composition of our interhuman space changes, it is like a “social convoy” (Ray Pahl 2000) where with time some people drop out, some people appear and even after our death we are still for a moment accompanied by a funeral conduct of relatives, friends and acquaintances. For me this is the crucial trait of society. Society is not a holistic, supra-human entity, some presumed social organism or social system with sui generis properties and regularities. But it is neither a chaotic mass of separate, autonomous individuals living their life on their own. Society for me is a network of relations among the people; what happens between and among individuals in the inter-human space. Human life is precarious, we are fragile animals, exposed to innumerable threats and finally destined to die. Large part of such precariousness is due to our social, relational existence, to the unavoidable and indispensable company of other people. We need others for a number of reasons. Without an intimate relation between our parents we would not have been born, and without maternal and parental care in our childhood we would not have survived. We need others as suppliers of goods and services that we cannot provide for ourselves. We need others as listeners and interlocutors in this most typical human action, talking. We need other as partners in cooperation, in order to reach goals which can be obtained only collectively, with our share directly dependent on the efforts of others. Finally, we need others as a social mirror (Charles H. Cooley 1983) in which we can estimate our worth and develop our self-concept. We can never be entirely sure how others will behave toward ourselves, how they will respond to our actions. We encounter perennial uncertainty, relatively","PeriodicalId":140910,"journal":{"name":"Trust in Contemporary Society","volume":"43 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114042673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Relation between Interpersonal Trust and Adjustment: Is Trust Always Good?","authors":"K. Rotenberg","doi":"10.1163/9789004390430_010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004390430_010","url":null,"abstract":"experimenter; (c) negatively associated with delinquent behavior during high school; and (d) positively associated with completion of the Incomplete Sen-tences Blank as a measure of adjustment. The studies yielded support for the conclusion that individuals who hold high trust beliefs in others are inclined to show trustworthiness than their low trusting counterparts.","PeriodicalId":140910,"journal":{"name":"Trust in Contemporary Society","volume":"532 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123064613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Social Trust in Japan and Taiwan: A Test of Fukuyama’s Thesis","authors":"R. Marsh","doi":"10.1163/9789004390430_012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004390430_012","url":null,"abstract":"Beginning around 1980, a new wave of theoretical concern with trust emerged (Sztompka 2001). This was a response to two things: the perception that social and political trust are in decline, and the argument that trust is essential to a good society (Levi 2001). The profusion of recent studies of trust contains a variety of methodologies, ranging from psychological approaches to trust as a personality attribute and experiments using Prisoner’s Dilemma games, to historical, ethnographic and survey research, with the last of these divided into studies of particular communities or a single society and cross-societal comparative surveys. The present study uses the last of these methods in order to answer the question: when the people of two or more societies have similar or different levels of trust, what are the causes and consequences of this? In earlier research, Hall (1999) sought explanations for the decline of trust in both Britain and the United States. Paxton (1999) suggested that generalized trust (of strangers) is low in societies where the rule of law is weak and corruption rampant. The causal mechanisms through which trust, generated by participation in voluntary organizations, is generalized to trust of strangers, in Sweden, Germany and the United States, were analyzed by Stolle (2001). Freitag (2003) compared the development of generalized trust in Japan and Switzerland. Economists interested in economic growth have also begun to empirically examine the role of trust. Zak and Knack (2001), for example, used data on generalized trust from 41 societies in the World Values Surveys to demonstrate that formal institutions (property rights and contract enforceability), the relative absence of corruption, lower levels of income and land inequality, and social homogeneity increase economic growth in part by building on the trust that exists among people. The present study is designed to test Francis Fukuyama’s claim that Japan has a higher level of generalized interpersonal trust than Taiwan, and to reconsider what he sees as the causes and consequences of this. What disturbed me when I recently read Fukuyama’s 1995 book, Trust: The Social Virtues and","PeriodicalId":140910,"journal":{"name":"Trust in Contemporary Society","volume":"254 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133501101","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Decline of Trust in Government","authors":"Geoffrey A. Hosking","doi":"10.1163/9789004390430_007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004390430_007","url":null,"abstract":"Observers’ surprise at the recent rise of populist parties in many European countries, the triumph of Brexit in the UK referendum of June 2016 and the election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency in November 2016 has shown how poorly questions of generalised social trust are understood by most political commentators and social scientists. The best explanation for these epochal events is a sharp decline in public trust. The Edelman Trust Barometer records this decline in recent years. It is a worldwide poll, but its figures show European countries and the usa as being among the worst affected, with half or more of their populations believing the present system is not working. The Edelman figures suggest that public trust in government, business, the public media and ngos are all falling, trust in the Chief Executive Officers of large businesses especially sharply. The result is a rising sense of injustice and helplessness, a lack of hope and confidence in the present system, and a desire for radical change. All of these features help to explain the public’s loss of faith in established parties of government and opposition and its growing attachment to populist parties which offer faith in ordinary people and simple solutions to complex problems.1 In order to understand what is going on, then, it is crucial that we study generalised social trust systematically. I offered a framework for doing so in my Trust: a History (Oxford University Press, 2014), and I also suggested why social distrust is growing within modern Western societies. In this paper I take that account further, up to the critical votes and decisions of 2015–16. Trust is a universal human need. We all need to take decisions every day about how to behave in certain situations. Most of those decisions concern the future in some way. We are virtually never in a position to know and weigh rationally all the factors affecting any given decision; instead we have to trust certain constants in our life, and decide according to habit, feeling and personal taste. The trust involved here can always be traced back to general social trust. Individual trust is always placed within a framework of broader trust vectors within society. The guarantees of our trust are cultural and social entities:","PeriodicalId":140910,"journal":{"name":"Trust in Contemporary Society","volume":"363 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132829447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}