Interpersonal trust: an event-based account

摘要

Trusting other people is essential for modern societies, in which the sheer complexity of interpersonal relationships renders more traditional control-based strategies of interpersonal cooperation increasingly inefficient (Luhmann, 1979). There is no agreed-upon standard definition of the concept of trust, but the key idea is that “trusting a person means believing that when offered the chance, he or she is not likely to behave in a way that is damaging to us” (Gambetta, 1988, p. 219). While beliefs need not necessarily be supported by reasons, people often do trust a trustee more in the face of information that allows predicting his or her behavior. This means that a core aspect of trust consists in social predictability.