Trust (social science)
[4][page needed] The uncertainty stems from the risk of failure or harm to the trustor if the trustee does not behave as desired.
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 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.
[20] Trust acts as a decisional heuristic, allowing the decision-maker to overcome bounded rationality[21] and process what would otherwise be an excessively complex situation.
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.
[26] Modern information technologies have not only facilitated the transition to a post-modern society but have also challenged traditional views on trust.
[27] The discussion surrounding the relationship between information technologies and trust is still in progress as research remains in its infant stages.
[may be outdated as of August 2023] Several dozen studies have examined the impact of ethnic diversity on social trust.
The notion of trust is increasingly adopted to predict acceptance of behaviors by others, institutions (e.g. government agencies), and objects such as machines.
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.
Within the context of a long-term relationship, which is dependent on trust, similar facial features increased a person's attractiveness.
[46] 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.
[47] People in low trust relationships tend to make distress-maintaining attributions[jargon][48] 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.
[50] Children of divorce do not exhibit less trust in mothers, partners, spouses, friends, and associates than their peers of intact families.
[61] 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.
[63] The social identity approach explains a person's trust in strangers as a function of their group-based stereotypes or in-group favoring behaviors which they base on salient group memberships.
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.
[64] Participants have no prior or future opportunities for interaction, thereby testing Brewer's notion that group membership is sufficient to bring about group-based trust and hence cooperation.
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.
[41] 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 can act as an economic lubricant, reducing the cost of transactions between parties, enabling new forms of cooperation, and generally furthering business activities,[79] employment, and prosperity.
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.
Several games and game-like scenarios related to trust have been tried, with certain preferences to[clarification needed] those that allow the estimation[specify] of confidence in monetary terms.
[86] 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.
[91] Games based on the Prisoner's Dilemma link trust with economic utility and demonstrate the rationality behind reciprocity.
[96] Reputation-based systems can improve trust assessment by capturing a collective perception of trustworthiness; this has generated interest in various models of reputation.
[99][100] Structure often creates trust in a person, and this encourages them to feel comfortable and excel in the workplace; it makes an otherwise stressful environment manageable.
The trustworthiness of a component is thus, not surprisingly, defined by how well it secures a set of functional and non-functional properties, deriving from its architecture, construction, and environment, and evaluated as appropriate.
