Trust and Networks

Trust is a fundamental element of social networks. Historically, the degree to which a network advances or recedes is critically tied to issues of trust. There are extensive lines of research exploring issues of trust in and between networks, from both humanistic and [Page 875]social scientific perspectives. Yet these areas also continue to be an ongoing concern in such diverse public fields as education, health, media, business, scientific industry, nonprofits, computer networks (security and e-commerce), and politics—and in more private associations like families, neighborhoods, and other small groups and communities.

Published findings on social networks contribute to the knowledge of how more or less person-to-person trust impacts any group, organization, institution, or collective. While there are numerous scholarly definitions of the terms trust and networks, each can be defined in relatively simple terms. Trust is the expected degree of honesty, reciprocity, and interdependence one may assume in relation to others. Networks describe various configurations of individuals who are tied together in relationships for some common purpose or goals. Throughout the ages, many thinkers have perceived trust as necessary to the very foundation of civilization—noting that human beings cannot progress in any way without some basic care and accountability toward one another. That is, some threshold of reciprocity between oneself and others underpins the development of all networks within and between different societies and cultures.

These reciprocal conditions are necessary to both the most virtuous and the most heinous networks. A charity such as Habitat for Humanity can be seen as exhibiting a high degree of trust between its employees, the citizens served by its organization, and the larger publics who donate to its activities. Yet to function, even the most odious social networks such as hate groups or terrorist cells must maintain some semblance of trust within their memberships while they continue to assert separations between themselves and others.

The difficulty with which trust is distributed among human beings is illustrated by these types of tensions. Some parallel issues in networks include how static or fluid that trust is, the frequency of trustful communication, the opportunities and limitations trustees are granted, the waxing and waning of trust over time, to whom trust is given, in what situations trust is most manifest, and the physical and social distances between individuals in a collective. There has been a great deal of study on the subject of trust and networks and the complex relationship between the two phenomena. The larger dimensions of how trust has been conceptualized in networks are most easily understood through a historical perspective. Across interdisciplinary literatures, there are past, present, and future developments connecting many of the central issues regarding how trust is advanced and maintained relative to networks.