Trust

by

Karen Cook, Bogdan State

• LAST REVIEWED: 25 October 2018
• LAST MODIFIED: 25 February 2016
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756384-0062

Introduction

Trust is a recurrent theme in social science literature. Since the 1970s it has become the focus of a great deal of empirical work in efforts to identify its causes and effects in social life. Several key book-length monographs and edited collections seem to have stimulated the growth of research and writing on trust in the social sciences. Among these were the 1988 volume edited by Diego Gambetta, Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, and the widely circulated book by Frances Fukuyama, Trust: Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, published in 1995. A number of themes in these two volumes set the agenda for subsequent research, including efforts to understand the linkages between trust and economic development. Robert Putnam, a political scientist, took up this agenda as he put the thesis of declining civic participation at the center of criticisms of modern societies. For Putnam, the core claim was one of the demise of social capital, which included declining social trust. In this article, we discuss the literature that focuses specifically on trust at four levels of analysis (interpersonal, organizational, interorganizational, and institutional), separating this discussion from the more general category of work on social capital, originally defined by Putnam as encompassing networks, norms, and trust. No single discipline can claim to have covered this topic in its entirety. The field of trust research is truly interdisciplinary, with regular contributions from researchers across all the sciences, especially psychology, political science, anthropology, sociology, management science, and, more recently, neurobiology, behavioral economics, and even computer science. Each field offers a unique perspective, and each perspective has resulted in significant, theoretically important contributions to the field. Perhaps as a result, disciplinary boundaries have blurred considerably as research has progressed. Sociologists tend to emphasize the relational characteristics of trust, and relational characteristics, in turn, are generally classified according to the level of aggregation (e.g., individual level, community level, population level, organizational level, and societal level). In this review, we cover many of the important contributions that have set the research agenda concerning the role of trust in society.

Book Series and Handbooks

The Russell Sage Foundation book series on trust coedited by Karen S. Cook, Russell Hardin, and Margaret Levi includes influential books across many domains by authors who have conducted empirical work on trust at different levels of analysis, as well as several major theoretical treatments of the topic. The books in this series are referenced at the website of the Russell Sage Foundation. The Handbook of Trust Research (Bachmann and Zaheer 2006) is one of the first handbooks to summarize research over fifteen years on trust, especially the work focused on organizations and management. Besides the Russell Sage Foundation book series, there are few handbooks that cover the breadth of work that has been done on trust.

• Bachmann, Reinhard, and Akbar Zaheer, eds. 2006. Handbook of trust research. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.

  DOI: 10.4337/9781847202819Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Summarizes key theoretical conceptualizations and empirical studies of many investigators primarily from business schools in the United States and Europe. It brings together work that focuses on management and leadership in increasingly nonhierarchical settings. It also examines the role of trust in organizational processes as well as in interorganizational relationships in a global context and discusses the role of trust in the economy more generally.

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• Kramer, Roderick M., ed. 2006. Organizational trust: A reader. Oxford Management Readers. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

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  This edited volume gathers together in one volume many of the most provocative and influential papers published on the topic of organizational trust. It traces scholarly work from the roots of the development of trust to its emergence as a central research agenda for scholars of modern organizations. Kramer provides trust scholars and organizations researchers with a reference volume capable of serving as a broad guide that orients researchers to the field of organizational trust.

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• Lyon, Fergus, Guido Möllering, and Mark N. K. Saunders, eds. 2015. Handbook of research methods on trust. 2d ed. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

  DOI: 10.4337/9781782547419Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Provides an overview of the successes, challenges, and innovations of present-day trust researchers. It gathers together, in one volume, the broad array of approaches and research methodologies employed in research on trust. Designed as a guide for empirical researchers, each chapter contains modern, firsthand explanations of successful investigation strategies.

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Data Sources

Several general surveys have been used widely since the late 20th century in the analysis of trust and its correlates. These include the General Social Survey (GSS) conducted in the United States; the European Social Survey (ESS), a similar enterprise in Europe; and the World Values Survey (WVS), which includes a broad array of countries and topics. The GSS is conducted at the University of Chicago each year. During its numerous administrations beginning in 1972, the survey has asked a variety of trust-related questions. Most notably, the GSS has tracked general trust. In addition, special modules of the survey have investigated trust in multiple contexts: social groups, the family, the workplace, or the doctor-patient relationship being a few examples. These surveys are included here because they have provided the bulk of the evidence, beyond some experimental evidence, concerning attitudes about trust and cross-cultural differences in trust, which are substantial.

• General Social Survey.

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  This survey, conducted annually, is the longest-running project of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, since 1972. It monitors social change and the growing complexity of American society through the collection of demographic and attitudinal information. It is also linked to a number of similar surveys done in other countries.

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• European Social Survey.

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  This survey is similar to the GSS, although it is a less explored data source in analyses of trust-related phenomena. The survey is a biennial, pan-European project now recording its seventh wave of survey administration since its beginning in 2002. The ESS not only includes data on social and general trust but also tracks trust in political institutions.

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• World Values Survey.

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  This survey is frequently used in trust research worldwide and completed Wave 6 of data collection (2010–2014). The WVS includes a number of measures of trust in a variety of countries (Wave 6 includes fifty-seven countries). While the 1990 wave featured questions on general trust, trust in various social groups, and trust in government, later waves pursued only the former two questions. In collaboration with the ESS, six waves have been completed from 1981 to 2014.

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Journals

There are two early-21st-century journals dedicated to the publication of trust research: the Journal of Trust Research and the Journal of Trust Management. The first, created in 2011 and published by Routledge, has the goal of providing an outlet for much of the research being done on trust in various settings, but in particular in organizations, business, and the international arena. Peter Li, at the University of Copenhagen Business School, is the current editor of the Journal of Trust Research, which is the only journal exclusively devoted to these topics. The second journal, created in 2014 and published by Springer, is more narrowly focused, concentrating on computational trust and trust management. Stephen Marsh, of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, is its current editor.

• Journal of Trust Management.

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  Designed to encompass all aspects of trust management and computational trust, with the goal to incorporate and exchange research and ideas across computer science, the social sciences, and security sectors. It therefore incorporates a wide variety of perspectives: technical, social, psychological, legal, economical, and cultural.

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• Journal of Trust Research.

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  This interdisciplinary journal’s mission is to publish the latest research on trust, which is viewed as central to constructive social interaction and cooperation at all levels in society, including at the organizational and institutional levels. In addition, it focuses on practical solutions to trust-related management issues.

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Definitions and Theory Construction

No definition of trust is universally accepted; however, important theoretical orientations are distinguishable by the characteristics they have tended to emphasize. In this section we identify a few of the readings that serve to define trust and set the stage for much of the subsequent theoretical debate and research on the role of trust in society. Morton Deutsch, a social psychologist, conducted one of the earliest experiments on trust, attempting to specify the conditions under which interpersonal trust emerges (Deutsch 1958). Luhmann 1979, Luhmann 1988, and Barber 1983 discuss the ways in which trust is central to social relations and social organization, while Coleman 1990 introduces the topic in a major work on social theory and develops the seeds of a rational-choice perspective on trust. Lewis and Weigert 1985 is a thorough metatheoretical comparison and overview of theoretical approaches to trust, beginning with Émile Durkheim and then continuing to Georg Simmel and Talcott Parsons, up through the work of Niklas Luhmann and Bernard Barber. These authors introduce the notion that trust is an important basis for all social relationships and influences power, politics, and all social exchanges. Pettit 1995 examines the factors that lead to trust, which the author defines as an act of making oneself vulnerable to another on the basis of perceived loyalty, virtue, or prudence. The book that put trust on the agenda for those interested in societal-level effects of trust in different cultural contexts is Fukuyama 1995. Cook 2003 provides an introduction to the different perspectives on trust and the ways in which it has been used empirically to understand the production of social order and cooperation at various levels in society. These contributions generally provide some insight into the varied ways in which trust has been approached by different disciplines. Barber, James Coleman, Karen Cook, and Luhmann are sociologists, and the others are psychologists, philosophers (Philip Pettit), or historians (Francis Fukuyama) who have analyzed or conducted experiments on trust (Deutsch).

• Barber, Bernard. 1983. The logic and limits of trust. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press.

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  Barber makes an important distinction between the various ways in which trust can fail: the fiduciary obligations of actors when it is their duty to represent others’ best interests, the technical competence of individuals acting in roles, and when morality fails. His focus is primarily on the ways in which trust expectations are not met (i.e., when trustworthiness is lacking).

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• Coleman, James S. Trust. In Foundations of social theory. By James S. Coleman, 91–116. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990.

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  The paper’s most prominent contribution is its clear definition of the trust game, as well as its discussion of the significance of trust in allowing for otherwise impossible social action. Coleman also develops the subject of trust by using the principle of utility maximization and discusses the factors that determine trustworthy behavior on the part of the trustee.

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• Cook, Karen S., ed. 2003. Trust in society. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

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  This interdisciplinary edited volume includes important pieces by many of those who later developed key theoretical approaches to the study of trust, in particular Diego Gambetta and Michael Bacharach, Roderick Kramer, Russell Hardin, and others in political science, sociology, and psychology. This volume begins with theories of trust and includes empirical chapters on the role of trust in various social settings.

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• Deutsch, Morton. 1958. Trust and suspicion. Journal of Conflict Resolution 2.4: 265–279.

  DOI: 10.1177/002200275800200401Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Deutsch differentiates trust from expectation and risk, further discussing suspicion and the mutuality of trust. He shows experimentally how trust can be achieved even when an overt orientation to each other’s welfare does not exist between partners. In these circumstances Deutsch finds the emergence of trust to be more likely in situations involving extensive communication, control, or the presence of a mutually disagreeable third party.

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• Fukuyama, Francis. 1995. Trust: The social virtues and the creation of prosperity. New York: Free Press.

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  Fukuyama argues that social trust varies by culture and that this variation correlates with economic development. He compares individualistic societies in which sociability often centers on nonkinship relations with more-familial societies. He also contends that the capacity to form large-scale organizations that extend beyond family is critical to economic development.

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• Lewis, David J., and Andrew Weigert. 1985. Trust as a social reality. Social Forces 63.4: 967–985.

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  Lewis and Weigert discuss the general importance of trust in social systems. They conceive of trust as a mechanism for reducing informational complexity typically present in social relationships. The authors argue against the purely behavioral view of trust and contend that it is improper to study trust in experimental one-shot games such as the prisoner’s dilemma.

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• Luhmann, Niklas. 1979. Trust: A mechanism for the reduction of social complexity. In Trust and Power: Two works. By Niklas Luhmann, 1–103. Chichester, UK: Wiley.

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  The book adopts a systems perspective on trust, with roots in the functionalist tradition in sociology. For Luhmann, trust solves the problem of social complexity, of the essential uncertainty surrounding the future. While acknowledging the importance of interpersonal trust as a building block of social life, Luhmann also contends that institutional, depersonalized trust represents the most important form of trust in advanced societies.

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• Luhmann, Niklas. 1988. Familiarity, confidence, trust: Problems and alternatives. In Trust: Making and breaking cooperative relations. Edited by Diego Gambetta, 94–107. New York: Blackwell.

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  Luhmann examines the distinctions between three related concepts: familiarity, confidence, and trust. Familiarity represents the known and is based on frequent interaction, often with no risk involved. Trust is a solution to a specific problem of risk, whereas confidence is a means of dealing with danger. Luhmann contends that confidence, familiarity, and trust may be partial substitutes under certain conditions.

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• Pettit, Philip. 1995. The cunning of trust. Philosophy & Public Affairs 24.3: 202–225.

  DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.1995.tb00029.xSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Pettit examines the nature of trust, defined as “interactive, trusting reliance,” in which an actor relies on another in a manifest way, expecting the trustee to carry through as a result of the trustee’s desire for ascertaining their reliability. Three mechanisms are seen as building trust: loyalty, virtue, and prudence. These are all reasons why the trustee can be expected to respond positively.

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Theories of Trust and Trustworthiness

There are a number of differing theoretical perspectives on trust. We identify some of the more distinctive approaches to the study of trust and delineate briefly how they differ in descriptions of some of the key publications. It was necessary to be highly selective, given the extensive social science literature on this topic. The pieces we have selected to annotate consist of some of the most significant papers that define trust and distinguish it from cooperation and other mechanisms contributing to the production of social order. Historically, one of the key reasons for the amount of cross-disciplinary interest in trust research is a broader interest in the evolutionary puzzle presented in the altruistic behavior of humans. For this reason, much of the early work on trust was linked directly to research on cooperation, and many empirical investigations of trust have explicitly linked these two constructs (e.g., the prisoner’s dilemma). In a now-famous 1981 Science article, “The Evolution of Cooperation,” Robert Axelrod and William Hamilton demonstrated that a “tit for tat” strategy was evolutionarily stable. This finding, expanded on in Axelrod 1984, presented a severe challenge to late-20th-century models of rational choice, the predictions of which tended to be based on the assumed superiority of a defect-only strategy. The finding had significant ramifications for the research of scholars in many of the social sciences, generating a flurry of research activity as theories were extended, corrected, or defended. Building on this work, Russell Hardin and others developed more-strategic models of relations of trust. Hardin’s approach (Hardin 1992, Hardin 2002) later came to be known as the “encapsulated interest” model of trust relations, focusing on the conditions under which trust is likely to emerge between two parties as well as specifying the determinants of trustworthiness. Cook, et al. 2007 extended Hardin’s approach to clarify the conditions under which cooperation is produced without trust. Related conceptions of trust include Gambetta 1988, an important work on signaling, and Diego Gambetta’s subsequent empirical research on trustworthiness and the ways in which individuals determine who can be trusted (Gambetta and Hamill 2009). Alternative theoretical perspectives have been proposed in a number of disciplines. The psychological orientation, for example, has tended to define trust as the acceptance of vulnerability; an example of this can be found in Rousseau, et al. 1998. Economist Oliver Williamson (Williamson 1993) took the view that trust plays only a role in personal (i.e., noneconomic) relationships and has only a very minor role in economic relationships, in contrast to the view of Kenneth Arrow (see Arrow 1974, cited under Control and Changing Modes of Organization). Williamson’s article was controversial, and its claims remain contested; the Journal of Trust Research, for example, marked the twenty-year anniversary of Williamson 1993 with a special issue devoted to subsequent developments of these issues. Simultaneously, the rise of behavioral economics and neurobiology in the 1990s expanded the field of trust research considerably, and the many developments subsequent to Axelrod 1984 can be found in Kurzban, et al. 2015.

• Axelrod, Robert. 1984. The evolution of cooperation. New York: Basic Books.

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  Using the prisoner’s-dilemma game as the basis for his formulation, Axelrod demonstrates how an evolutionarily stable strategy better known as “tit for tat” develops and is relatively resistant to invasion, once established in a social setting. This agenda-setting book stimulated much of the subsequent experimental (and simulation) work on cooperation, reciprocity, and trust, especially that based on iterated prisoner’s-dilemma games.

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• Cook, Karen S., Russell Hardin, and Margaret Levi. 2007. Cooperation without trust? New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

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  The authors argue that while trust may play a large role in interpersonal relationships and potentially in networks of relationships, it is much less likely to provide adequate support for larger-scale enterprises. The authors clarify the links among confidence, reliability, and trust and generally argue against the thesis that general trust produces social order. What is referred to in the literature as general trust may instead be a consequence of social order.

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• Dasgupta, Partha. 1988. Trust as a commodity. In Trust: Making and breaking cooperative relations. Edited by Diego Gambetta, 49–72. New York: Blackwell.

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  Dasgupta proposes a model in which actors are split between two groups, each sharing a dominant strategy—either honesty or cheating—with no reputation system present. Dasgupta complicates the model by introducing memory and reputations; agents form expectations about others on the basis of their knowledge of others’ history and develop expectations about the world on the basis of their own experiences.

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• Gambetta, Diego. 1988. Can we trust trust? In Trust: Making and breaking cooperative relations. Edited by Diego Gambetta, 213–237. New York: Blackwell.

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  Gambetta puts forth one of the most frequently cited definitions of trust, seen as a subjective probability evaluation. He views trust as a probability threshold, the relevance of which is predicated on the existence of uncertainty. Gambetta also rejects the view that trust is a scarce resource that needs to be “economized.”

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• Gambetta, Diego, and Heather Hamill. 2009. Streetwise: How taxi drivers establish customers’ trustworthiness. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

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  Gambetta and his coauthor examine in some detail the ways in which taxi drivers determine whom they can safely pick up for a ride in New York City and Belfast. The key question they address is whether taxi drivers in dangerous cities pay more attention to hard-to-fake signals when evaluating potential customers.

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• Hardin, Russell. 1992. The street-level epistemology of trust. Analyse & Kritik 14.2: 152–176.

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  Hardin combines rational-choice and cognitive approaches in developing a theoretical model of trust, by using a “commonsense” Bayesian approach. Prior experience with trust is seen as important in determining one’s willingness to trust new partners. Overall, Hardin’s model describes an individual’s propensity to trust as the result of a lifelong learning process in which new experiences continually update the actor’s prior experiences.

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• Hardin, Russell. 2002. Trust and trustworthiness. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

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  Hardin describes trust as a three-part relation. One actor may trust another with respect to a particular domain of activity to the extent that the trustee’s interests are encapsulated in those of the trustor. This is more likely to occur if the relationship is valued or if the trustee cares about his reputation for trustworthiness. This volume is one of the first to make clear the analytical distinction between trust and trustworthiness.

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• Kurzban, Robert, Maxwell N. Burton-Chellew, and Stuart A. West. 2015. The evolution of altruism in humans. Annual Review of Psychology 66:575–599.

  DOI: 10.1146/annurev-psych-010814-015355Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  The evolution of altruism remains a contested area of research. These authors review this broad and interdisciplinary body of work as well as the main theories proposed to explain the development of prosocial behavior. In addition to the development of trust, they also focus on the development of punishment, reciprocity, kinship, and morality.

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• Rousseau, Denise M., Sim B. Sitkin, Ronald S. Burt, and Colin F. Cemerer. 1998. Not so different after all: A cross-discipline view of trust. Academy of Management Review 23.3: 393–404.

  DOI: 10.5465/AMR.1998.926617Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  This review article covers debates over definitions of trust, static and dynamic views of trust, the role of trust in causal frameworks, and the problem of levels of analysis in investigations of trust. The authors also identify different forms of trust: calculus based, deterrence based, relational, and institutional. They suggest that a transition might be occurring in the prevailing forms of trust from institutional to individual and network-based trust.

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• Williamson, Oliver E. 1993. Calculativeness, trust, and economic organization. Journal of Law and Economics 36.1: 453–486.

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  Williamson contends that trust is nothing more than a risk evaluation, and therefore relations that are described by the blanket term “trust” should instead be analyzed through the prism of “competent calculativeness.” He sees trust as an alternative mode of interaction to the contractual framework implied by calculativeness, reserving “nearly noncalculative” personal interactions for trust where monitoring is not feasible.

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Survey Measures

Many of the research projects undertaken to study trust at various levels of analysis have used survey methods to obtain data on trust. The General Social Survey and the World Values Survey are just two of the questionnaires that have included items to measure general trust as well as trust in specific institutions, people, or groups. The American National Election Survey (ANES) has also included items measuring trust during some waves. We mention only a few of the articles that include survey analysis, some of which mix this method of investigation with other methods such as experiments or field studies. One of the first attempts to develop items that would measure trust in the context of interpersonal relationships was Rotter 1967, published in the Journal of Personality. Useful scales for measuring trust in close personal relations were developed in Larzelere and Huston 1980. Useful measures have also been developed that focus on specific contexts. In the context of the health-care industry, trust in doctor-patient relationships is developed in Hall, et al. 2002. Scales measuring trust in organizational research are reviewed in Dietz and Den Hartog 2006 and McEvily and Tortoriello 2011. Many subsequent efforts have focused on creating new survey items to measure trust (e.g., Yamagishi and Yamagishi 1994), attempting to clarify the meaning of existing measures (e.g., Miller and Mitamura 2003 and Sturgis and Smith 2010) or developing new ways of judging the validity of the survey measures as predictors of trusting behavior (e.g., Glaeser, et al. 2000 and Etang, et al. 2012). Continued advances in measurement techniques and embedded experiments in surveys will help researchers better assess levels of trust and allow us to develop more-fine-grained conceptualizations.

• Dietz, Graham, and Deanne N. Den Hartog. 2006. Measuring trust inside organisations. Personnel Review 35.5: 557–588.

  DOI: 10.1108/00483480610682299Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Dietz and Den Hartog review literature evaluating the role of trust within organizations and discuss the extent to which these measures depart from or contribute to existing conceptualizations of trust within the workplace. Of particular relevance is the appendix, which contains fourteen measures of intraorganizational trust.

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• Etang, Alvin, David Fielding, and Stephen Knowles. 2012. Are survey measures of trust correlated with experimental trust? Evidence from Cameroon. Journal of Development Studies 48.12: 1813–1827.

  DOI: 10.1080/00220388.2011.64926Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  These authors measure the correlation between survey-based measures of trust and trust behavior in two villages in Cameroon. Trust behavior is measured via a standard trust game (see Berg, et al. 1995, cited under Experimental Measures), and participants play this game with people from their own village as well as with people from a neighboring village. Participants also complete a trust survey; the survey is closely modeled after Glaeser, et al. 2000 but is supplemented with questions about social distance that are deemed relevant given the experimental treatment of the trust game. These researchers find a high degree of correlation between survey and experimental trust measures; however, they also note that many correlations depend on social distance.

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• Glaeser, Edward L., David I. Laibson, Jose A. Scheinkman, and Christine L. Soutter. 2000. Measuring trust. Quarterly Journal of Economics 115.3: 811–846.

  DOI: 10.1162/003355300554926Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Glaeser and his colleagues use a mix of survey and experimental methods to examine the relationship between general trust survey items and actual entrusting behavior. The authors find that reported past trusting behavior predicts current trusting behavior and that reported general trust predicts current trustworthy behavior but not entrusting behavior. However, questions eliciting trust in strangers do predict entrusting behavior.

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• Hall, Mark A., Beiyao Zheng, Elizabeth Dugan, et al. 2002. Measuring patients’ trust in their primary care providers. Medical Care Research and Review 59.3: 293–318.

  DOI: 10.1177/1077558702059003004Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Hall and his collaborators develop a Health Care Relationship Trust scale to measure trust between patients and their health-care providers. Numerous citations document the continued prevalence of this scale in related work within the health-care industry. These researchers provide an overview of the results of surveys employing this scale.

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• Larzelere, Robert E., and Ted L. Huston. 1980. The dyadic trust scale: Toward understanding interpersonal trust in close relationships. Journal of Marriage and the Family 42.3: 595–604.

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  The authors develop an eight-item dyadic trust scale to gauge trust in intimate, romantic relationships. The scale is tested on a sample of several hundred dyads in several marital stages (dating, married, divorced). Larzelere and Huston find trust to be the only consistently reciprocated feeling among their subjects; the subjects’ trust also appears to be correlated with their love for their partner.

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• McEvily, Bill, and Marco Tortoriello. 2011. Measuring trust in organisational research: Review and recommendations. Journal of Trust Research 1.1: 23–63.

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  McEvily and Tortoriello provide a comprehensive review of 171 published papers in which trust is quantified. They use these papers to document evidence of the limited consensus on aspects of trust research, particularly focusing on the relevance of such measures in the context of research on organizations.

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• Miller, Alan S., and Tomoko Mitamura. 2003. Are surveys on trust trustworthy? Social Psychology Quarterly 66.1: 62–70.

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  Miller and Mitamura discuss measurement problems involved in the standard question used to measure general trust in most surveys. They demonstrate that the question contrasts trust with caution, rather than distrust, and that this conceptual mismatch may help explain some surprising results, such as males being found to be higher in trust than females when using this instrument.

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• Rotter, Julian B. 1967. A new scale for the measurement of interpersonal trust. Journal of Personality 35.4: 651–665.

  DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6494.1967.tb01454.xSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Rotter presents and tests an instrument for measuring interpersonal trust, on the basis of social-learning theory. His conception of trust is based on reinforcement as a result of experience and on the generalization of experience to others with whom the subject has no previous experience. After presenting the rationale for the scale, Rotter examines its reliability in an empirical setting.

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• Sturgis, Patrick, and Patten Smith. 2010. Assessing the validity of generalized trust questions: What kind of trust are we measuring? International Journal of Public Opinion Research 22.1: 74–92.

  DOI: 10.1093/ijpor/edq003Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Sturgis and Smith critically examine whether trust surveys measure particularized trust or generalized trust, assessing which of the two frames of reference are more common among survey respondents. They conduct an experiment in which two versions of a trust survey are administered: one with the conventional battery of trust questions, the other with an alternative version that is more specific in its wording. Evidence from their experiment suggests respondents predominantly interpreted trust questions as particularized trust, contrary to what had been expected. They also find that respondents who interpret the questions as particularized trust tended to report higher levels of trust than those who interpreted the questions as referring to people in general.

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• Yamagishi, Toshio, and Midori Yamagishi. 1994. Trust and commitment in the United States and Japan. Motivation and Emotion 18.2: 129–166.

  DOI: 10.1007/BF02249397Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  This paper contradicts the conventional view according to which Japanese society is higher in trust than American society. The authors argue that Japan has more-developed assurance structures than the United States, which reduce the need for interpersonal trust. Comparative survey results confirm the authors’ predictions, with American respondents higher in general trust than Japanese respondents.

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Experimental Measures

An alternative to the study of trust through the use of social surveys is conducting experiments on behavior that might be an indicator of trust. There are a number of experimental paradigms in use for the experimental study of trust, but one of the most common is the trust game and versions of it. Perhaps the most widely used is the one-shot game introduced in Berg, et al. 1995, initially designed as a simple setting in which trust is clearly detected behaviorally. Early-21st-century researchers more commonly employ more-complex variants of this original design with variable investment levels, many with repeated rather than one-time interactions. These variations have allowed researchers to measure the degree of trust and reciprocity, rather than its mere existence (see the review of this literature provided in Ostrom and Walker 2005). Experiments have also been used to bridge the distance between attitudinal survey questions that measure trust, which are notoriously abstract, vague, and difficult to interpret, and those that measure trust behavior (e.g., Glaeser, et al. 2000 and Sapienza, et al. 2013). There are also important efforts to design experiments that can distinguish trust-related behaviors from risk-taking behaviors, as Eckel and Wilson 2004 illustrates. More recently, researchers have begun to explore biological and neurological determinants of trusting behavior (e.g., Fehr 2009; Bos, et al. 2010; and Neumann 2014), an important avenue for future research.

• Berg, Joyce, John Dickhaut, and Kevin A. McCabe. 1995. Trust, reciprocity, and social history. Games and Economic Behavior 10.1: 122–142.

  DOI: 10.1006/game.1995.1027Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Introduces the “investment game,” in which one subject entrusts another with a sum of money from which the trustee can keep any amount. The Nash equilibrium prediction of no money being sent is rejected categorically. Both amount and frequency of reciprocation increase when subjects are provided with the social history of interaction.

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• Bos, Peter A., David Terburg, and Jack van Honk. 2010. Testosterone decreases trust in socially naïve humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 107.22: 9991–9995.

  DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0911700107Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Bos and colleagues conducted an experiment examining the effect of testosterone on trusting behavior. In a double-blind experiment, a randomly selected set of participants are administered testosterone. Later, participants are presented with a series of pictures of faces and asked to evaluate trustworthiness of the individual in the picture, and these evaluations are then used to assign participants a level of interpersonal trust. Results indicate that testosterone significantly decreases the level of interpersonal trust. Several follow-up studies have been conducted, the results of which can be found in “New Evidence on Testosterone and Cooperation,” by van Honk, Estrella R. Montoya, Bos, Mark van Vugt, and Terburg, in Nature 485.7399 (2012): E4–E5.

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• Eckel, Catherine C., and Rick K. Wilson. 2004. Is trust a risky decision? Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 55.4: 447–465.

  DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2003.11.003Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Eckel and Wilson challenge the long-held view in the trust literature that the decision to entrust is seen as a risky decision akin to a gamble. The authors use an experimental design to show that measures of risk aversion are not significantly correlated with the decision to trust a stranger, a prediction of the trust-as-gamble hypothesis. This study is at odds with many that argue that the significance of risk in the decision to trust.

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• Fehr, Ernst. 2009. On the economics and biology of trust. Journal of the European Economic Association 7.2–3: 235–266.

  DOI: 10.1162/JEEA.2009.7.2-3.235Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Fehr provides an extensive review of biological and behavioral evidence indicating that trusting behavior is not a special type of risk-taking behavior, and that trusting behavior instead is based on other social preferences, such as aversion to betrayal. The literature review takes the form of a metatheoretical study; Fehr provides tables and graphs that enable the reader to readily compare findings from numerous studies across a variety of focus areas within the trust literature. He ultimately concludes that trust ought to be defined as a behavior, and he argues that this definition is in opposition to definitions of trust that incorporate beliefs.

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• Glaeser, Edward L., David I. Laibson, Jose A. Scheinkman, and Christine L. Soutter. 2000. Measuring trust. Quarterly Journal of Economics 115.3: 811–846.

  DOI: 10.1162/003355300554926Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Glaeser and colleagues combine the results of two trust game experiments with information from survey responses measuring trust and trustworthiness on a population of Harvard undergraduates. In the reported results, responses to General Social Survey (GSS) attitudinal trust questions are only 34 percent correlated with participant behavior observed in the trust games. Attitudinal questions from other trust scales are also included and are similarly not significant. However, they do identify two attitudinal questions about trust in strangers in general, with significant predictive power. They find that individual trustworthiness behavior is significantly moderated by race, nationality, and status differences in participant dyads.

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• Neumann, Robert. 2014. Understanding trustworthiness: Using response latencies from CATI surveys to learn about the “crucial” variable in trust research. Quality & Quantity 48 (16 December).

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  Neumann supplements existing research on trust and trustworthiness by measuring response latencies of participants answering a standard battery of survey questions about generalized trust. This provides an additional dimension potentially useful in interpreting the results obtained from surveys on trust. Latency information is used to test hypotheses concerning the cognitive processes involved in forming an expectation of an individual’s trustworthiness. Results indicate slower response times when trustworthiness is measured as an expectation about the behavior of general strangers.

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• Ostrom, Elinor, and James S. Walker, eds. 2005. Trust and reciprocity. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

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  This edited volume includes a number of chapters that explore issues of trust and reciprocity, primarily by using game theoretic formulations and experimental methods. Several chapters provide an overview of what we know about the conditions that produce cooperation under varying conditions, especially the institutional mechanisms that foster cooperation and facilitate collective action, when self-interest would mitigate against it due to the possibility of free-riding.

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• Sapienza, Paola, Anna Toldra‐Simats, and Luigi Zingales. 2013. Understanding trust. Economic Journal 123.573: 1313–1352.

  DOI: 10.1111/ecoj.12036Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Sapienza and colleagues reconsider trust questions in the World Values Survey and the General Social Survey in light of information provided in Glaeser, et al. 2000, suggesting that the survey measures are largely uncorrelated with results obtained in the trust game in Berg, et al. 1995. These authors indicate that much of this apparent disparity can be resolved after accounting for the beliefs and preferences of participants involved in the study.

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Interpersonal or Relational Trust

A major focus of the research on trust is the trust that develops in interpersonal relationships, often called “relational trust,” when distinctions are made between levels of analysis. In this category of work, some researchers study the trust of specific people for one another or the trust that develops between people in particular culturally defined categories or groups (Cultural and Ethnic Differences). Others focus on the trust of other people in general (Interpersonal Trust and Distrust). We refer to this latter work as research on general trust. Several large surveys have been done both within the United States and in a number of other countries (included in the World Values Survey) that try to determine the levels of general trust between people in specific regions or countries. This method of investigation is not well suited to the study of interpersonal trust, and early-21st-century researchers generally prefer experimental methods when measuring trust between people. We summarize some of the more influential articles and books on this type of trust.

Microlevel Dynamics

A number of publications attempt to analyze the emergence of trust over time in various settings, analyzing the networks of individuals who form relations of cooperation (e.g., Buskens 2002), often based on trust. Some of this work extends empirical analysis by developing simulations that assist in the development of theory (e.g., Macy and Skvoretz 1998). Much of the research focuses on the micro level, examining for example the degree to which commitment between individuals leads to trust (see Kollock 1994) and the role that risk and trust play in decisions to engage in various types of exchange (see Cook, et al. 2005 and Molm, et al. 2000). A related development is the investigation of other commitment mechanisms that bind the individuals to one another and thus foster trustworthiness. One such mechanism involves providing something of value as a “bond” that is lost if trust fails. Snijders and Buskens 2001 and Raub 2004 refer to this strategy as “hostage posting.”

• Buskens, Vincent. 2002. Social networks and trust. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer.

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  Buskens investigates the emergence of trust in social networks and the linkages among trust, control, and learning. In this volume, he presents the results of simulations and experimental tests of theory that help tease apart the mechanisms that underlie the development of trust in small-scale social systems.

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• Cook, Karen S., Toshio Yamagishi, Coye Cheshire, Robin Cooper, Masafumi Matsuda, and Rie Mashima. 2005. Trust building via risk taking: A cross-societal experiment. Social Psychology Quarterly 68.2: 121–142.

  DOI: 10.1177/019027250506800202Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Compares a classic prisoner’s-dilemma design to a modified prisoner’s dilemma with risk taking and finds more cooperation when players can choose the amount entrusted. As expected, there is less trust building occurring in risk-averse Japan than in the United States. More cooperation resulted from fixed-partner games than from random-partner games, indicating the presence of a “shadow of the future” (see Axelrod 1984, cited under Theories of Trust and Trustworthiness).

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• Kollock, Peter. 1994. The emergence of exchange structures: An experimental study of uncertainty, commitment, and trust. American Journal of Sociology 100.2: 313–345.

  DOI: 10.1086/230539Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Uses an exchange experiment to investigate the effect of uncertainty on the creation of exchange networks. Kollock finds that interpersonal trust and committed exchange relationships are significantly more likely under high uncertainty. Likewise, concern for sellers’ reputations was higher under conditions of uncertainty. He also points out the complexity of exchange strategies and argues for a finer-grained measure of commitment.

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• Macy, Michael W., and John Skvoretz. 1998. The evolution of trust and cooperation between strangers: A computational model. American Sociological Review 63.5: 638–660.

  DOI: 10.2307/2657332Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Uses computer simulations based on a genetic algorithm to investigate the evolution of trust and cooperation in a variably embedded prisoner’s dilemma, where actors have different possibilities of interacting with neighbors and complete strangers. Two kinds of stable strategies appear in the simulations: parochial and universalistic. Parochialism is found to emerge when exit is a costly option, whereas the emergence of universalistic strategies is more likely in small neighborhoods.

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• Molm, Linda D., Nobuyuki Takahashi, and Gretchen Peterson. 2000. Risk and trust in social exchange: An experimental test of a classical proposition. American Journal of Sociology 105.5: 1396–1427.

  DOI: 10.1086/210434Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Tests whether trust and commitment arise more readily in reciprocal, rather than negotiated, exchange. The exchange experiment performed by the authors provides evidence supportive of this proposition. Furthermore, low-power situations are found to engender trust more frequently than high-power settings. Unexpectedly, the actors also uncover a strong interaction effect: trust increases disproportionally in situations of low-power reciprocal exchange.

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• Raub, Werner. 2004. Hostage posting as a mechanism of trust: Binding, compensation, and signaling. Rationality and Society 16.3: 319–365.

  DOI: 10.1177/1043463104044682Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Discusses a generalized version of the trust game, containing uncertainty (a “move of nature” with known probability), imperfect information, and hostage posting. Raub shows that if transaction costs are low enough, and if hostages are sufficiently valuable to the trustors and of sufficiently low worth to the trustees, the problem of trust can be solved.

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• Snijders, Chris, and Vincent Buskens. 2001. How to convince someone that you can be trusted? The role of “hostages.” Journal of Mathematical Sociology 25.4: 355–383.

  DOI: 10.1080/0022250X.2001.9990260Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Discusses the role of hostage posting in the trust game and restricts analysis to nonbribing hostages that are not fully binding for the trustee. The study shows that hostage posting significantly influences players’ intentions to trust each other but fails to show any evidence of the binding aspect of a hostage being significant in the trust decision.

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Macrolevel Dynamics

At the macro level, much of the work on trust is about institutions that foster cooperation even when distrust is the norm, as in the cases examined in Banfield 1958 and Pagden 1988. In other settings, various mechanisms arise to simulate trust relations where they might not otherwise exist, as in the case discussed in Ensminger 2001, involving “fictive-kin” relations. While Ensminger 2001 addresses mechanisms that work at the interpersonal level to secure significant transactions, Braithwaite 1998 focuses on the role of institutionalized distrust in providing grounds for trust in government and at a minimum some protection from the abuse of power.

• Banfield, Edward C. 1958. The moral basis of a backward society. New York: Free Press.

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  Banfield examines a community in which distrust of those outside the family was the norm. Three factors coalesced to make concerted activity beyond the immediate family difficult: the absence of extended families, a high death rate, and particular land tenure practices, resulting in an ethos he famously labeled “amoral familism.”

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• Braithwaite, John. 1998. Institutionalizing distrust, enculturating trust. In Trust and governance. Edited by Valerie Braithwaite and Margaret Levi, 343–375. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

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  Braithwaite contrasts trust in government institutions with interpersonal trust. While the benefits of interpersonal trust are backed by extensive research, the desirability of trust in government is contingent on a system of checks that promote “institutionalized distrust” and thereby prevent governmental abuse of trust. A second major contribution is the contrast between “trust as confidence” evidenced by trustors and “trust as obligation” as perceived by the trustees.

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• Ensminger, Jean. 2001. Reputations, trust and the principal agent problem. In Trust in society. Edited by Karen S. Cook, 186–201. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

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  Ensminger contrasts the views of trust as calculative assessment and as a means of dealing with uncertainty. The author examines the case of Orma cattle herders in Kenya. She, however, contends that even in this seemingly noncalculative example, trust has a rational basis, characterizing the problem of cattle herding among the Orma as one that implies large agency costs.

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• Pagden, Anthony. 1988. The destruction of trust and its economic consequences in the case of eighteenth-century Naples. In Trust: Making and breaking cooperative relations. Edited by Diego Gambetta, 127–141. New York: Blackwell.

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  Pagden presents a case study showing how trust can decay in a society—namely, the Kingdom of Naples as part of the Spanish Empire, under the rule of the House of Hapsburg. He proposes the cause for the kingdom’s brewing economic troubles in the first half of the 17th century to be the Hapsburgs’ policies, which effectively destroyed trust among the citizens of Naples.

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General Trust

While there is a very large literature on general trust, often simply called social trust, we include only a few examples of the empirical work on this topic. A number of other entries in this article also refer to this topic. Generalized trust refers to the degree to which individuals “trust” someone they meet without prior knowledge or an interaction history. Some theorists prefer to define this orientation toward strangers as optimism or the tendency to believe in human benevolence, while others treat general trust as the result of a kind of social intelligence that entails the capacity to judge the potential trustworthiness of others in situations in which there is potential gain from an interaction. Some define general trust as the product of an orderly society. In this sense, social order produces general social trust, since it lowers risk and uncertainty. Alesina and La Ferrara 2002 investigates the factors that cause people to trust others in general. Paxton 2007, among many other studies, analyzes the relationship between associational membership and general trust, while Rothstein and Stolle 2001 attempts to determine what factors lead to high and low levels of general trust. These works represent just two of the vast number of empirical efforts devoted to investigating the links between social capital and trust. Many of these investigations are similar to Delhey and Newton 2005 and Hooghe, et al. 2009, which try to tease out the factors relevant to cross-national differences in general social trust.

• Alesina, Alberto, and Eliana La Ferrara. 2002. Who trusts others? Journal of Public Economics 85.2: 207–234.

  DOI: 10.1016/S0047-2727(01)00084-6Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  The authors use regression methods to analyze General Social Survey data to determine what factors cause people to trust others. Traumatic experiences, minority status, and lack of economic success all are found to be significant predictors of low levels of general trust in others. People are less trusting if they live in racially diverse communities, particularly if they hold anti-integration beliefs.

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• Delhey, Jan, and Kenneth Newton. 2005. Predicting cross-national levels of social trust: Global pattern or Nordic exceptionalism? European Sociological Review 21.4: 311–327.

  DOI: 10.1093/esr/jci022Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  The study investigates the heterogeneity of general-trust measures between countries, as revealed by the World Values Survey. Neither anomie nor associational membership is found to be a predictor of general trust. The authors do uncover a “syndrome” of variables closely connected to general trust, including Protestantism, ethnic homogeneity, economic wealth and equality, lack of corruption, and democracy.

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• Hooghe, Marc, Tim Reeskens, Dietlind Stolle, and Ann Trappers. 2009. Ethnic diversity and generalized trust in Europe: A cross-national multilevel study. Comparative Political Studies 42.2: 198–223.

  DOI: 10.1177/0010414008325286Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Examines the effect of ethnic diversity on general trust in twenty European countries, by using the European Social Survey along with data on migration patterns. The authors find, using more-fine-grained measures of diversity and a multilevel model, that there is little relationship between diversity and generalized trust, in contrast to Robert Putnam’s claims.

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• Paxton, Pamela Marie. 2007. Association memberships and generalized trust: A multilevel model across 31 countries. Social Forces 86.1: 47–76.

  DOI: 10.1353/sof.2007.0107Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Tests the effects of individual-level and country-level variables on general trust. Analysis confirms that trust increases with age, level of education, and duration of employment; has no relation to gender; and is negatively related to life events such as divorce. At the country level, the paper focuses on associational membership and develops a distinction between associations with connected and isolated membership patterns.

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• Rothstein, Bo, and Dietlind Stolle. 2001. Social capital and street-level bureaucracy: An institutional theory of generalized trust. Paper presented at the “Trust in Government Conference” at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 30 November 2001.

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  Seeks to explain the frequently reported variation in national and individual levels of social capital. Fair and impartial institutions are assumed to engender general trust, whereas discriminatory institutions are said to create distrust. The authors establish that inequality and corruption beget low levels of general trust, whereas a belief in the neutrality of institutions promotes social trust.

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Organizational Trust

There is a significant body of work examining the role of trust within and between organizations. In the next two sections we describe only a few such studies as examples of the wide variety of work on these topics. The work ranges from discussions of the limits of trust as a control mechanism to analyses of the significance of establishing trust in alliances or organizational networks. Trust at the interpersonal level within organizations as well as at the interorganizational level is an important issue given the limitations of incentives, monitoring, sanctioning, and the impossibility of complete contracts.

Interorganizational Networks and Alliances

Relationships between organizations can also be characterized in terms of the degree of trust or distrust between the key actors involved. A large body of literature focuses on the nature and determinants of interorganizational trust. Powell 1996 discusses the various forms of trust-based governance in business. Zaheer, et al. 1998 studies specific buyer-supplier relationships, and Dyer and Chu 2000 examines supplier-manufacturer relations in order to investigate the impact of trust on performance. Further examination of the nature of contractual relationships and alliances between firms and in various industries in Lorenz 1988 and Gulati 1995 provides evidence that trust is essential when the stakes are high and contracts are hard to specify.

• Cao, Zhi, and Fabrice Lumineau. 2015. Revisiting the interplay between contractual and relational governance: A qualitative and meta-analytic investigation. Journal of Operations Management 33–34:15–42.

  DOI: 10.1016/j.jom.2014.09.009Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Cao and Lumineau provide a wide-ranging meta-analytic investigation of the extant trust literature advancing either the calculative or rational perspective on trust relationships in organizational contexts. A total of 149 empirical studies are included in this analysis. Although the authors ultimately conclude that the nature of the interplay between formal contracts and relational governance remains equivocal, they are able to identify certain significant patterns, such as which factors tend to moderate the experimental results.

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• Dyer, Jeffrey H., and Wujin Chu. 2000. The determinants of trust in supplier-automaker relationships in the US, Japan, and Korea. Journal of International Business Studies 31.2: 259–285.

  DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8490905Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Examines trust levels between auto parts suppliers and car manufacturers in the United States, South Korea, and Japan. The authors contrast three frameworks: a process-based view (for which they argue), which emphasizes the interactions between players; an “embeddedness” view that ties trust to social networks; and an institutional view that underscores the role of institutions in the creation of trust.

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• Gulati, Ranjay. 1995. Does familiarity breed trust? The implications of repeated ties for contractual choice in alliances. Academy of Management Journal 38.1: 85–112.

  DOI: 10.2307/256729Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Argues for a process-focused, temporal view of interfirm interaction, with trust as one of the main regulatory mechanisms, distinguishing between equity-based and non-equity-based alliances. While the former kind require a relatively low level of trust, trust is crucial for non-equity-based alliances with higher opportunities of loss from defection. Gulati’s view is supported by a comprehensive, fifteen-year sample of alliances from three industries.

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• Lorenz, Edward H. 1988. Neither friends nor strangers: Informal networks of subcontracting in French industry. In Trust: Making and breaking cooperative relations. Edited by Diego Gambetta, 194–210. New York: Blackwell.

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  Lorenz uses field data from French engineering firms to study the increasingly prevailing practice of subcontracting in the French economy. Lorenz argues that the subcontracting agreements are self-enforcing, because the potential retribution incurred from cheating is “sufficient to deter opportunism and ensure that contractual obligations are met.”

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• Poppo, Laura, Kevin Zheng Zhou, and Julie J. Li. 2015. When can you trust “trust”? Calculative trust, relational trust, and supplier performance. Strategic Management Journal.

  DOI: 10.1002/smj.2374Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Poppo, Zhou, and Li, similar to the authors of Schilke and Cook 2015, subject the two bases for trust in organizational settings (calculative trust and relational trust) to a critical examination. They emphasize the differences in the two perspectives: calculative trust is based on the structure of penalties and rewards, while relational trust is anchored in past behavior and is characterized by a shared identity. The authors review early-21st-century work, concluding that calculative trust and relational trust often coexist in business relationships. They take issue with empirical work that treats organizational trust as an aggregate construct including both these measures. The paper delineates the separate effects each form of trust has on exchange performance and on the types of attributes that moderate exchange performance.

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• Powell, Walter W. 1996. Trust-based forms of governance. In Trust in organizations: Frontiers of theory and research. Edited by Roderick M. Kramer and Tom R. Tyler, 51–67. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

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  Powell addresses the problem of trust and cooperation in the context of potentially antagonistic business relationships. Included are four contexts where high levels of trust have emerged between business partners that would ordinarily find themselves in antagonistic positions: in the case of industrial districts, research and development (R&D) networks, business groups, and strategic alliances.

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• Schilke, Oliver, and Karen S. Cook. 2015. Sources of alliance partner trustworthiness: Integrating calculative and relational perspectives. Strategic Management Journal 36.2: 276–297.

  DOI: 10.1002/smj.2208Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  These authors critically examine two distinct perspectives on the sources of organizational trustworthiness. The calculative perspective emphasizes the primacy of actors’ rational calculations; the relational perspective, anchored in sociological and psychological thinking, focuses on the social underpinnings of trustworthiness. Schilke and Cook make progress toward integrating these perspectives by using dyadic survey data from 171 strategic organizational alliances to identify the conditions under which the calculative or relational perspective predominates.

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• Zaheer, Akbar, Bill McEvily, and Vincenzo Perrone. 1998. Does trust matter? Exploring the effects of interorganizational and interpersonal trust on performance. Organization Science 9.2: 141–159.

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  Zaheer and colleagues examine the ways in which trust matters at two distinct levels: the interpersonal and the interorganizational. Specifically, they investigate trust in their study of buyer-seller relationships between firms engaged in electrical-equipment manufacturing. In particular, they focus on the effects of trust at both levels on negotiations and ultimately on the firm performance as their key outcome variable.

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Economic Institutions

The relationship between trust and economic institutions is an important one and is an area of research that has attracted significant scholarly attention. Work within this line emphasizes the role of informal mechanisms (e.g., trust), and what effect such informal contracts have on economic development. This emphasis distinguishes this work from scholarship on formal mechanisms and organizational form (e.g., markets) and organizational forms (e.g., hierarchies). Bradach and Eccles 1999 clarifies these distinctions and identifies the variety of mechanisms used to manage economic transactions, ranging from price and authority to those based on trust. Complex forms of organization extending beyond the older dichotomy of markets and hierarchy have emerged in response to the changing global environment in business and the service sector. Ostrom 2000, by the cowinner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics, argues for incorporation of trust and reciprocity in an extension of rational-choice models of collective action, in tune with developments in behavioral economics since the start of the 21st century. Additional efforts to understand the role of social factors in economic activity include Knack and Keefer 1997, a discussion of the link between general trust (a form of social capital) and economic growth, and Zak and Knack 2001, an investigation of low trust, inequality, and the lack of economic growth. In addition, a number of experimental studies (e.g., Bohnet and Baytelman 2007) examine the factors in institutional environments that foster trustworthiness and thus greater trust. Importantly, when the perception of risk is high and distrust sets in, then the opportunity for economic growth is reduced (see Slovic 1993 and Radaev 2005). Historically, changes in the nature of social relations and the environment have altered the conditions that produce trust in relation to the structure of economic activities (see Zucker 1986 and Shapiro 1987). This list includes only a handful of the many studies using surveys and experimental methods to analyze the role of trust in the economy.

• Bohnet, Iris, and Yael Baytelman. 2007. Institutions and trust: Implications for preferences, beliefs and behavior. Rationality and Society 19.1: 99–135.

  DOI: 10.1177/1043463107075110Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Uses experimental methods to test whether institutions influence entrusting behavior and trustworthiness. Bohnet and Baytelman do not find enough evidence against the hypothesis that the institutional environment affects only the players’ beliefs and not their motivations. The study finds the cost of betrayal to be the crucial factor determining the influence of institutions on beliefs about partners’ behavior in the trust game.

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• Bradach, Jeffrey L., and Robert G. Eccles. 1999. Price, authority, and trust: From ideal types to plural forms. Annual Review of Sociology 15:97–118.

  DOI: 10.1146/annurev.so.15.080189.000525Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Bradach and Eccles analyze the complex structures that underpin economic transactions in addition to markets and hierarchies. The authors argue that these mechanisms may occur not only independently but also in combination with one another, in “plural forms” such as in business groups or franchise networks. They propose a process-oriented view that focuses on the path-dependent emergence of complex forms.

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• Knack, Stephen, and Philip Keefer. 1997. Does social capital have an economic payoff? A cross-country investigation. Quarterly Journal of Economics 112.4: 1251–1288.

  DOI: 10.1162/003355300555475Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Uses data from the World Values Survey to test the posited relationship between social capital (measured through general trust) and economic growth. This relationship is confirmed, but no evidence is found in support of Robert Putnam’s contention that associational activity improves social capital and thereby economic performance. Trust is found to be high in countries with formal contract-enforcing institutions and in those countries low in class and ethnic polarization.

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• Ostrom, Elinor. 2000. A behavioral approach to the rational choice theory of collective action. American Political Science Review 92.1: 1–22.

  DOI: 10.2307/2585925Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Argues for the development of a rational-choice model of social dilemmas and collective action that eschews the problems inherent in models that assume complete rationality. Ostrom argues for a need to combine individual-level variables as well as structural characteristics in “second-generation” models of rationality that emphasize learning processes and that use reciprocity, trust, and reputation as their building blocks.

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• Radaev, Vadim. 2005. Establishing trust in a distrustful society: The case of Russian business. In Trust and entrepreneurship: A West-East perspective. Edited by Hans-Hermann Höhmann and Frederieke Welter, 114–135. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.

  DOI: 10.4337/9781845428099Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  This chapter addresses the establishment of economic relationships and trust in environments where formal institutions are weak, with a particular focus on the role of the state. The author shows the establishment of honesty and trustworthiness to be the top priority for Russian businessmen. With the attitude of Russian entrepreneurs being adversarial toward the state, contracts are enforced privately with regard to customary rules.

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• Shapiro, Susan P. 1987. The social control of impersonal trust. American Journal of Sociology 93.3: 623–658.

  DOI: 10.1086/228791Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Shapiro discusses the solution to the problem of trust provided by institutional mechanisms, focusing more broadly on trust at the institutional level. When interpersonal trust is infeasible or inefficient, “impersonal trust” acts as a substitute, enabling the creation of the agency relationships that dominate large, advanced societies. This solution, she argues, serves to remedy the problems inherent in contracts that are hard to write and even more difficult to monitor and enforce.

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• Slovic, Paul. 1993. Perceived risk, trust, and democracy. Risk Analysis 13.6: 675–682.

  DOI: 10.1111/j.1539-6924.1993.tb01329.xSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Explains the observed increase in risk perceptions among the American public at a time when objective risk has decreased. Slovic notes the asymmetric effect that negative information has on risk perception, and that, once entrenched, distrust perpetuates itself. He argues that trust in technical assessments of risk is necessary for such communications to be effective in reducing risk perception among the public.

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• Zak, Paul J., and Stephen Knack. 2001. Trust and growth. Economic Journal 111.470: 295–321.

  DOI: 10.1111/1468-0297.00609Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Zak and Knack predict that trust leads to growth and will be higher in homogenous societies and that income inequality and discrimination depress trust. They also posit the existence of a “low-trust poverty trap.” The model is tested by using data from the World Values Survey, and the authors find empirical support for their predictions.

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• Zucker, Lynne G. 1986. Production of trust: Institutional sources of economic structure, 1840–1920. Research in Organizational Behavior 8:53–111.

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  Zucker examines the emergence of formal trust structures historically in the United States. She argues that a series of exogenous factors, such as migration and an unstable economy, disrupted interpersonal trust and generated a need for formal trust structures. She identifies bureaucracy, credentialing, a service economy, and a regulatory apparatus as the four most important of such structures.

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Political Institutions

Trust in government and political leaders has also attracted significant attention, both concerning government in general (see Hetherington 1998) and interactions with local government (see Levi and Stoker 2000). Evidence suggests that trust is higher in local leaders than in those at a distance. Just as individuals tend to trust their doctor but not physicians in general, people tend to place more trust in the local politician. It is also argued in this body of literature that trust may not be essential to the working of political institutions and that institutionalized forms of distrust as checks and balances on the abuse of power are often more effective than reliance on personal trust relations. The stakes are simply too high. A general treatment of these issues can be found in Braithwaite and Levi 2003. A significant and ongoing debate in early-21st-century scholarship focuses on understanding the relationship between social capital and civic participation; in the context of trust research, this has appeared in debates concerning the relationship between a society’s generalized trust and its form of government (see Putnam, et al. 1993 and Uslaner 2000). Some evidence suggests that trust is more frequently the product of democratic institutions that provide stability, rather than its cause (see Cleary and Stokes 2009 and Inglehart 1999).

• Armingeon, Klaus, and Besir Ceka. 2013. The loss of trust in the European Union during the great recession since 2007: The role of heuristics from the national political system. European Union Politics 15.1: 82–107.

  DOI: 10.1177/1465116513495595Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  The authors seek to understand the connection between the Great Recession and the massive decline both in public support for the European integration project and public trust in the European Union itself. In the course of a wide-reaching meta-analytical empirical investigation, several alternative causal explanations are considered. However, the variable with the most explanatory power is the level of trust in the national government. Armingeon and Ceka use this evidence to conclude that support and trust for the European Union are cultivated locally, within the boundaries of each nation-state.

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• Braithwaite, Valerie, and Margaret Levi, eds. 2003. Trust and governance. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

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  This edited volume includes papers that examine the role of trust in governance at the organizational and institutional levels. A number of topics are covered, including tax compliance (by John Scholz), citizen trust in government (by Braithwaite), the role of fair and impartial institutions (by Levi and by Tom Tyler), distrust at the community level in relation to the disadvantaged (by Mark Peel), and trust and economic development in China (by Susan Whiting), among others.

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• Cleary, Matthew, and Susan Stokes. 2009. Democracy and the culture of skepticism: Political trust in Argentina and Mexico. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

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  Investigates linkages between trust and the quality of democratic institutions in Latin America, on the basis of case studies of Argentina and Mexico. This is in addition to existing survey data not properly interpreted previously. The authors’ surveys reveal a more complex relationship, indicating that low levels of trust are a symptom of poor government performance rather than a cause. Healthy skepticism is required, not uninformed trust in the absence of fair and impartial institutions.

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• Hardin, Russell. 2013. Government without trust. Journal of Trust Research 3.1: 32–52.

  DOI: 10.1080/21515581.2013.771502Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Scholars of political trust generally acknowledge that both trust and social capital are declining in several advanced democratic political systems (e.g., the United States, Canada, Sweden, and the United Kingdom), and Hardin provides a novel interpretation for these widely acknowledged trends. His central claim is that citizens are losing confidence in government precisely because they no longer require its help to manage the economy. He argues that because macroeconomic interactions are considerably more complex in the 21st century as compared to the 20th century, decisions concerning how it should best be managed involve a correspondingly higher degree of ambiguity and require more-specialized knowledge. For these reasons, Hardin concludes that declining confidence in government may point to citizens being unable to rely on the clarity and (relatively) unambiguous choices of previous eras.

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• Hetherington, Marc J. 1998. The political relevance of political trust. American Political Science Review 92.4: 791–808.

  DOI: 10.2307/2586304Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Hetherington notes the marked decline in trust in government from 1964 to 1996. He uses simultaneous equation modeling to create a model of political trust that resolves the issue of endogenous relationships between political trust and dissatisfaction with political leaders and institutions. He shows that political trust has an independent effect on satisfaction with government performance.

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• Inglehart, Ronald. 1999. Trust, well-being and democracy. In Democracy and trust. Edited by Mark E. Warren, 88–120. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

  DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511659959Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Inglehart uses data from multiple surveys to test the relationships between democratic institutions, trust, and welfare. He contends that interpersonal trust is a stable characteristic of societies and is influenced by macrolevel factors. His second contention concerns the causal relationship between trust and democracy: while interpersonal trust is found to support democracy, democracy is not found to be a necessary cause of interpersonal trust.

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• Keele, Luke. 2007. Social capital and the dynamics of trust in government. American Journal of Political Science 51.2: 241–254.

  DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2007.00248.xSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Keele notes that the significant decline in trust in government since the 1950s is generally attributed to declining social capital or poor government performance. He investigates these claims empirically using macrolevel data to measure trust in government as a function of social capital and perceived government performance. He finds that both social capital and government performance are significantly related to trust in government, concluding that while government performance has strong effects on trust in government over the short term, the amount of social capital has a slower, lagged effect and ultimately explains more of the total variance in the level of trust in government when evaluated over the long term.

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• Levi, Margaret, and Laura Stoker. 2000. Political trust and trustworthiness. Annual Review of Political Science 3:475–507.

  DOI: 10.1146/annurev.polisci.3.1.475Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  The article is a comprehensive review of research on political trust in the second half of the 20th century, proceeding from a theoretical discussion of the concepts of trust and trustworthiness. Levi and Stoker note the lack of investigation of attitudes toward specific politicians and administrations, while general attitudes about political trust are shown to transcend beliefs about specific actors.

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• Marien, Sofie, and Marc Hooghe. 2011. Does political trust matter? An empirical investigation into the relation between political trust and support for law compliance. European Journal of Political Research 50.2: 267–291.

  DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-6765.2010.01930.xSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  The authors critically examine the widespread, yet largely untested, notion that low levels of political trust negatively affect the stability of democratic political systems. They evaluate what, if any, correlation exists between political trust and law-abiding attitudes, with the hypothesis that individuals with low levels of political trust may be more tolerant of instances in which the law is violated. This hypothesis is supported by survey data collected in thirty-three countries across Europe as part of the European Values Study. In particular, survey respondents with low levels of political trust were much more likely to consider behavior such as tax fraud acceptable.

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• Putnam, Robert D., Robert Leonardi, and Raffaella Y. Nanetti. 1993. Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

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  This volume is a nuanced study of the conditions under which democratic institutions thrive and are sustained at the local level. Putnam compares twenty regions in northern and southern Italy and proposes an explanation for why industry (and related economic development) thrived in the northern part of the country and was stagnated in the southern part.

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• Uslaner, Eric M. 2000. Producing and consuming trust. Political Science Quarterly 115.4: 569–590.

  DOI: 10.2307/2657610Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Uslaner argues against the view, popularized by Putnam and others, that voluntary associations are associated with trust. His regression analysis shows that only giving to charity and volunteering yields trust, whereas church group involvement produces mistrust. Uslaner proposes two alternate explanations for the observed decline in general trust in the United States: the rise of religious fundamentalism and the increase in economic inequality.

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