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Trust is the belief that another person will do what is expected. It brings with it a willingness for one social entity (the trustor) to become vulnerable to another party (the trustee), on the presumption that the trustee will act in ways that benefit the trustor. In addition, the trustor does not have control over the actions of the trustee. Scholars distinguish between generalized trust (also known as social trust), which is the extension of trust to a relatively large circle of unfamiliar others, and particularized trust, which is contingent on a specific situation or a specific relationship.
As the trustor is uncertainty about the outcome of the trustee's actions, the trustor can only develop and evaluate expectations. Such expectations are formed with a view to the of the trustee, dependent on their characteristics, the situation, and their interaction. The uncertainty stems from the risk of failure or harm to the trustor if the trustee does not behave as desired.
In the social sciences, the subtleties of trust are a subject of ongoing research. In sociology and psychology, the degree to which one party trusts another is a measure of belief in the honesty, fairness, or benevolence of another party. The term "confidence" is more appropriate for a belief in the Skill of the other party. A failure in trust may be more easily if it is interpreted as a failure of competence rather than a lack of benevolence or honesty. In economics, trust is often conceptualized as reliability in transactions. In all cases, trust is a heuristic decision rule, allowing a person to deal with complexities that would require unrealistic effort in rational reasoning.
Sviatoslav I contended that society needs trust because it increasingly finds itself operating at the edge between confidence in what is known from everyday experience and contingency of new possibilities. Without trust, one should always consider all contingent possibilities, leading to paralysis by analysis. Trust acts as a decisional heuristic, allowing the decision-maker to overcome bounded rationality and process what would otherwise be an excessively complex situation. Trust can be seen as a bet on one of many contingent futures, specifically, the one that appears to deliver the greatest benefits. Once the bet is decided (i.e. trust is granted), the trustor suspends his or her disbelief, and the possibility of a negative course of action is not considered at all. Hence trust acts as a reducing agent of social complexity, allowing for cooperation.
Sociology tends to focus on two distinct views: the macro view of social systems, and a micro view of individual social actors (where it borders with social psychology). Views on trust follow this dichotomy. On one side, the systemic role of trust can be discussed with a certain disregard to the psychological complexity underpinning individual trust. The behavioral approach to trust is usually assumed while actions of social actors are measurable, allowing for statistical modelling of trust. This systemic approach can be contrasted (2025). 9780769504933 ISBN 9780769504933 with studies on social actors and their decision-making process, in anticipation that understanding of such a process will explain (and allow to model) the emergence of trust.
Sociology acknowledges that the contingency of the future creates a dependency between social actors and, specifically, that the trustor becomes dependent on the trustee. Trust is seen as one of the possible methods to resolve such a dependency, being an attractive alternative to control. Trust is valuable if the trustee is much more powerful than the trustor, yet the trustor is under social obligation to support the trustee. Reprinted in:
Modern information technologies have not only facilitated the transition to a post-modern society but have also challenged traditional views on trust. Information systems research has identified that people have come to trust in technology via two primary constructs: The first consists of human-like constructs, including benevolence, honesty, and competence, whilst the second employs system-like constructs, such as usefulness, reliability, and functionality. The discussion surrounding the relationship between information technologies and trust is still in progress as research remains in its infant stages.
The review's meta-analysis of 87 studies showed a consistent, though modest, negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust. Ethnic diversity has the strongest negative impact on neighbor trust, in-group trust, and generalized trust. It did not appear to have a significant impact on out-group trust. The authors present a warning about the modest size of the effect, stating, "However, the rather modest size of the overall implies that apocalyptic claims regarding the severe threat of ethnic diversity for social trust in contemporary societies are exaggerated."
Trust is integral to the idea of social influence: it is easier to influence or persuade someone who is trusting. The notion of trust is increasingly adopted to predict acceptance of behaviors by others, institutions (e.g. government agencies), and objects such as machines. Yet once again, perceptions of honesty, competence and value similarity (slightly similar to benevolence) are essential.
There are three forms of trust commonly studied in psychology:
Research has been conducted into the social implications of trust, for instance:
One factor that enhances trust among people is facial resemblance. Experimenters who digitally manipulated facial resemblance in a two-person sequential trust game found evidence that people have more trust in a partner who has similar . Facial resemblance also decreased sexual desire for a partner. In a series of tests, digitally manipulated faces were presented to subjects who evaluated them for attractiveness within a long-term or short-term relationship. The results showed that within the context of a short-term relationship dependent on sexual desire, similar facial features caused a decrease in desire. Within the context of a long-term relationship, which is dependent on trust, similar facial features increased a person's attractiveness. This suggests that facial resemblance and trust have great effects on relationships.
Interpersonal trust literature investigates "trust-diagnostic situations": situations that test partners' abilities to act in the best interests of the other person or the relationship while rejecting a conflicting option which is merely in their self-interest. Trust-diagnostic situations occur throughout everyday life, though they can also be deliberately engineered by people who want to test the current level of trust in a relationship.
A low-trust relationship is one in which a person has little confidence their partner is truly concerned about them or the relationship. People in low trust relationships tend to make distress-maintaining attributions whereby they place their greatest focus on the consequences of their partner's negative behavior, and any impacts of positive actions are minimized. This feeds into the overarching notion that the person's partner is uninterested in the relationship, and any positive acts on their part are met with skepticism, leading to further negative outcomes.
people may miss opportunities for trusting relationships. Someone subject to an abusive childhood may have been deprived of any evidence that trust is warranted in future relationships. An important key to treating sexual victimization of a child is the rebuilding of trust between parent and child. Failure by adults to validate that sexual abuse occurred contributes to the child's difficulty in trusting self and others. A child's trust can also be affected by the erosion of the marriage of their parents. Children of divorce do not exhibit less trust in mothers, partners, spouses, friends, and associates than their peers of intact families. The impact of parental divorce is limited to trust in the father.
People may trust non-human agents. For instance, people may trust animals, the scientific process, and . Trust helps create a social contract that allows humans and domestic animals to live together. Trust in the scientific process is associated with increased trust in innovations such as biotechnology. When it comes to trust in social machines, people are more willing to trust intelligent machines with humanoid morphologies (2020). 9781450367462 ISBN 9781450367462 and female cues, when they are focused on tasks (versus socialization), and when they behave morally well. More generally, they may be trusted as a function of the "machine heuristic"—a mental shortcut with which people assume that machines are less biased, more accurate, and more reliable than people—such that people may sometimes trust a robot more than a person.
People are disposition to trust and to judge the trustworthiness of other people or groups—for instance, in developing relationships with potential Mentorship. One example would be as part of interprofessional work in the referral pathway from an emergency department to a hospital ward. Another would be building knowledge on whether new practices, people, and things introduced into our lives are indeed accountable or worthy of investing confidence and trust in. This process is captured by the empirically grounded construct of "Relational Integration" within Normalization Process Theory. This can be traced in neuroscience terms to the Neuroscience structure and activity of a human brain. Some studies indicate that trust can be altered by the application of oxytocin.
The social identity approach has been empirically investigated. Researchers have employed allocator studies to understand group-based trust in strangers. (2025). 9780387725963, Springer. ISBN 9780387725963 They may be operationalized as Unilateralism or relationships of exchange. General social categories such as university affiliation, course majors, and even ad-hoc groups have been used to distinguish between in-group and out-group members. In unilateral studies of trust, the participant is asked to choose between envelopes containing money that an in-group or out-group member previously allocated. Participants have no prior or future opportunities for interaction, thereby testing Marilynn Brewer notion that group membership is sufficient to bring about group-based trust and hence cooperation. Participants could expect an amount ranging from nothing to the maximum value an allocator could give out. Bilateral studies of trust have employed an investment game devised by Berg and colleagues in which people choose to give a portion or none of their money to another. Any amount given would be tripled and the receiver would then decide whether they would return the favor by giving money back to the sender. This was meant to test trusting behavior on the sender's part and the receiver's eventual trustworthiness.
Empirical research demonstrates that when group membership is salient to both parties, trust is granted more readily to in-group members than out-group members. This occurs even when the in-group's stereotype was comparatively less positive than the out-group's , , and when participants had the option of a sure sum of money (i.e. in essence opting out of the need to trust a stranger to gain some monetary reward). When only was made aware of group membership, trust becomes reliant upon group stereotypes. The group with the more positive stereotype was trusted (e.g. one's university affiliation over another's) even over that of the in-group (e.g. nursing over psychology majors).
Another explanation for in-group-favoring behaviors could be the need to maintain in-group positive distinctiveness, particularly in the presence of social identity threat. Trust in out-group strangers increased when personal cues to identity were revealed.
Karen Jones proposed an emotional aspect to trust—optimism that the trustee will do the right thing by the trustor, which is also described as "affective trust". People sometimes trust others even without this optimistic expectation, instead hoping that by extending trust this will prompt trustworthy behavior in the trustee. This is known as "therapeutic trust" and gives both the trustee a reason to be trustworthy, and the trustor a reason to believe they are trustworthy.
The definition of trust as a belief in something or a confident expectation about something eliminates the notion of risk because it does not include whether the expectation or belief is favorable or unfavorable. For example, to expect a friend to arrive to dinner late because she has habitually arrived late for the last fifteen years is a confident expectation (whether or not we find her late arrivals to be annoying). The trust is not about what we wish for, but rather it is in the consistency of the data. As a result, there is no risk or sense of betrayal because the data exists as collective knowledge. Faulkner contrasts such "predictive trust" with the aforementioned affective trust, proposing that predictive trust may only warrant disappointment as a consequence of an inaccurate prediction, not a sense of betrayal.
Trust is important to economists for many reasons. Taking the "Market for Lemons" transaction popularized by George Akerlof as an example, if a potential buyer of a car does not trust the seller not to sell a lemon, the transaction will not take place. The buyer will not buy without trust, even if the product would be of great value to the buyer. Trust can act as an economic lubricant, reducing the cost of transactions between parties, enabling new forms of cooperation, and generally furthering business activities, employment, and prosperity. This observation prompted interest in trust as a form of social capital and research into the process of creation and distribution of such capital. A higher level of social trust may be positively correlated with economic development: Even though the original concept of "high trust" and "low trust" societies may not necessarily hold, social trust benefits the economy and a low level of trust inhibits economic growth. The absence of trust restricts growth in employment, wages, and profits, thus reducing the overall welfare of society. The World Economic Forums of 2022 and 2024 both adopted the rebuilding of trust as their themes.Lahiri, I., Davos 2024: What the theme 'rebuilding trust' is all about, Euronews, published 11 January 2024, accessed 16 January 2024
Theoretical economical modelling demonstrates that the optimum level of trust that a rational economic agent should exhibit in transactions is equal to the trustworthiness of the other party. Such a level of trust leads to an efficient market. Trusting less leads to losing economic opportunities, while trusting more leads to unnecessary vulnerabilities and potential exploitation. Economics is also interested in quantifying trust, usually in monetary terms. The level of correlation between an increase in profit margin and a decrease in transactional costs can be used as an indicator of the economic value of trust.
Economic "trust games" empirically quantify trust in relationships under laboratory conditions. Several games and game-like scenarios related to trust have been tried, those that allow the estimation of confidence in monetary terms. In games of trust the Nash equilibrium differs from Pareto optimum so that no player alone can maximize their own utility by altering their selfish strategy without cooperation. Cooperating partners can also benefit. The classical version of the game of trust has been described as an abstract investment game, using the scenario of an investor and a broker. The investor can invest some fraction of his money, and the broker can return to the investor some fraction of the investor's gains. If both players follow their naive economic best interest, the investor should never invest, and the broker will never be able to repay anything. Thus the flow of money, its volume, is attributable entirely to the existence of trust. Such a game can be played as a once-off, or repeatedly with the same or different sets of players to distinguish between a general propensity to trust and trust within particular relationships. Several variants of this game exist. Reversing rules leads to the game of distrust, pre-declarations can be used to establish intentions of players, (2006). 9781595933034, Association for Computing Machinery. ISBN 9781595933034 while alterations to the distribution of gains can be used to manipulate the perceptions of both players. The game can be played by several players on the closed market, with or without information about reputation.
Other interesting games include binary-choice trust games and the gift-exchange game. Games based on the Prisoner's Dilemma link trust with economic utility and demonstrate the rationality behind reciprocity.
The popularization of e-commerce led to new challenges related to trust within the digital economy and the desire to understand buyers' and sellers' decisions to trust one another. (2001). 9780769509815 ISBN 9780769509815 For example, interpersonal relationships between buyers and sellers have been disintermediated by the technology, and consequentially they required improvement. Websites can influence the buyer to trust the seller, regardless of the seller's actual trustworthiness. Reputation-based systems can improve trust assessment by capturing a collective perception of trustworthiness; this has generated interest in various models of reputation.
Management and organization science scholars have also studied how trust is influenced by contracts and how trust interacts with formal mechanisms. Scholars in management and related disciplines have also made a case for the importance of distrust as a related but distinct construct. Similarly scholars have assessed the relationship between surveillance and trust, for example in a trust game context,Schweitzer, M. E., Ho, T. and Zhang, Z. (2016), How Monitoring Influences Trust: A Tale of Two Faces, Management Science: Articles in Advance, pp. 1–19, accessed 4 January 2024 and in shareholder-management relations.Lesmeister, S., Limbach, P. and Goergen, M., Trust and monitoring, Journal of Banking and Finance, Volume 143, October 2022, , accessed 4 January 2024
Since the mid-1990s, organizational research has followed two distinct but nonexclusive paradigms of trust research:
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