Trust

In The Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel (1978) offered a necessary starting point for the discussion of trust:

In his experiments with trust, Harold Garfinkel (1963) viewed “trust as a condition of stable concerted actions” (p. 187) that can be transformed into an “attitude of daily life” (p. 210).

Originally, trust (fiducia) was a personal phenomenon that, at least since Peter Lombard (1100–1160) denoted the volitional aspect (facultas voluntatis) of medieval Christian faith (fides). For Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), who accepted Lombard's reasoning that man is endowed with both volitional and rational capacities, facultas voluntatis et rationis, it is the will that guides reason in the human search for the final meaning of life in acceptance and love of God.

In his work Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, German sociologist Ferdinand Toennies (1971), secularized the notion of will and placed it on a societal level: “The scope of social will is the whole of the environmental conditioning of social interaction” (p. 94). Thus trust lost its personal character and became the foundation of social order. Emile Durkheim (1972) adopted this redefinition that shifted trust from a personal to a social fact that “is to be recognised by the power of external coercion which it exercises or is capable of exercising over individuals” (p. 58). This notion, that the underlying reality of trust is “irreducibly sociological” (Lewis & Weigert, 1985, p. 456), is still present in contemporary sociological approaches to trust.

In the second half of the 20th century, it was recognized in economics that trust as a form of social control has an economic value. Economic activities, including “production costs,” create “transaction costs” (Williamson, 1985, pp. 18–19); the costs of running economic activities correspond [Page 934]to the concept of friction in physics. Trust serves as a lubricant that smoothes transactions and is therefore a cost-saving device. As such, monetarized transaction costs and savings result from the application of trust. Trust thus becomes a commodity: trust and transaction costs are inversely related. Instead of transaction costs, E. L. Khalil (1994) wrote of “organisational costs” as “the cost of distrust and the cost to minimize it” (p. 392). The economic notion of trust as a cost-saving device stands on the sociological foundation of trust as a social control that limits the permissible and available repertoire of human behavior. Based on this principle, Francis Fukuyama (1995) applied the economic notion of trust to sociological theory, paralleling economic (transaction or organizational) costs with social costs: trust in a society is inversely related to the costs associated with monitoring and controlling its members (police, courts, etc.).

In psychology, trust has often been used as a personality variable. Some people are said to be more trusting and trustworthy than others. Erik Erikson (1950/1995) published his theory of trust based on the “eight ages of man” (p. 223) ranging from infancy to maturity. He wrote that children at the age of around one or two years of age, the first developmental stage, develop a sense of trust or mistrust toward the world around them and themselves. This assumption of introjection and projection regulating trust-mistrust polarity and the associated human tensions and anxieties led others to associate trust with prosocial and mistrust with antisocial personality traits: A trusting person evaluates others positively, “as essentially ‘good’ until proved otherwise” (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950, p. 411), and a mistrusting person evaluates them negatively, as dangerous and hostile.

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