Trust in Social Relations Schilke, Oliver; Reimann, Martin; Cook, Karen S
Annual review of sociology,
07/2021, Letnik:
47, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Trust is key to understanding the dynamics of social relations, to the extent that it is often viewed as the glue that holds society together. We review the mounting sociological literature to help ...answer what trust is and where it comes from. To this end, we identify two research streams-on particularized trust and generalized trust, respectively-and propose an integrative framework that bridges these lines of research while also enhancing conceptual precision. This framework provides the springboard for identifying several important avenues for future research, including new investigations into the radius of trust, the intermediate form of categorical trust, and the interrelationships between different forms of trust. This article also calls for more scholarship focusing on the consequences (versus antecedents) of trust, addressing more fully the trustee side of the relation, and employing new empirical methods. Such novel approaches will ensure that trust research will continue to provide important insights into the functioning of modern society in the years to come.
Research on the sources of organizational trustworthiness remains bifurcated. Some scholars have adopted a calculative perspective, stressing the primacy of actors' rational calculations, while ...others have approached trustworthiness from a relational perspective, focusing on its social underpinnings. We help to reconcile these seemingly disparate views by adopting an integrative approach that allows us to clarify the boundaries of both perspectives. Based on dyadic survey data from 171 strategic alliances, we find that the calculative perspective (represented by contractual safeguards) has higher predictive power when the partner lacks a favorable reputation. In contrast, the relational perspective (represented by organizational culture) predicts trustworthiness more strongly when familiarity with the partner organization is high.
Some social theorists claim that trust is necessary for the smooth functioning of a democratic society. Yet many recent surveys suggest that trust is on the wane in the United States. Does this ...foreshadow trouble for the nation? In Cooperation Without Trust? Karen Cook, Russell Hardin, and Margaret Levi argue that a society can function well in the absence of trust. Though trust is a useful element in many kinds of relationships, they contend that mutually beneficial cooperative relationships can take place without it. Cooperation Without Trust? employs a wide range of examples illustrating how parties use mechanisms other than trust to secure cooperation. Concerns about one’s reputation, for example, could keep a person in a small community from breaching agreements. State enforcement of contracts ensures that business partners need not trust one another in order to trade. Similarly, monitoring worker behavior permits an employer to vest great responsibility in an employee without necessarily trusting that person. Cook, Hardin, and Levi discuss other mechanisms for facilitating cooperation absent trust, such as the self-regulation of professional societies, management compensation schemes, and social capital networks. In fact, the authors argue that a lack of trust—or even outright distrust—may in many circumstances be more beneficial in creating cooperation. Lack of trust motivates people to reduce risks and establish institutions that promote cooperation. A stout distrust of government prompted America’s founding fathers to establish a system in which leaders are highly accountable to their constituents, and in which checks and balances keep the behavior of government officials in line with the public will. Such institutional mechanisms are generally more dependable in securing cooperation than simple faith in the trustworthiness of others. Cooperation Without Trust? suggests that trust may be a complement to governing institutions, not a substitute for them. Whether or not the decline in trust documented by social surveys actually indicates an erosion of trust in everyday situations, this book argues that society is not in peril. Even if we were a less trusting society, that would not mean we are a less functional one.
To provide social exchange on a global level, sharing-economy companies leverage interpersonal trust between their members on a scale unimaginable even a few years ago. A challenge to this mission is ...the presence of social biases among a large heterogeneous and independent population of users, a factor that hinders the growth of these services. We investigate whether and to what extent a sharing-economy platform can design artificially engineered features, such as reputation systems, to override people’s natural tendency to base judgments of trustworthiness on social biases. We focus on the common tendency to trust others who are similar (i.e., homophily) as a source of bias. We test this argument through an online experiment with 8,906 users of Airbnb, a leading hospitality company in the sharing economy. The experiment is based on an interpersonal investment game, in which we vary the characteristics of recipients to study trust through the interplay between homophily and reputation. Our findings show that reputation systems can significantly increase the trust between dissimilar users and that risk aversion has an inverse relationship with trust given high reputation. We also present evidence that our experimental findings are confirmed by analyses of 1 million actual hospitality interactions among users of Airbnb.
Power decreases trust in social exchange Schilke, Oliver; Reimann, Martin; Cook, Karen S.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
10/2015, Letnik:
112, Številka:
42
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
How does lacking vs. possessing power in a social exchange affect people’s trust in their exchange partner? An answer to this question has broad implications for a number of exchange settings in ...which dependence plays an important role. Here, we report on a series of experiments in which we manipulated participants’ power position in terms of structural dependence and observed their trust perceptions and behaviors. Over a variety of different experimental paradigms and measures, we find that more powerful actors place less trust in others than less powerful actors do. Our results contradict predictions by rational actor models, which assume that low-power individuals are able to anticipate that a more powerful exchange partner will place little value on the relationship with them, thus tends to behave opportunistically, and consequently cannot be trusted. Conversely, our results support predictions by motivated cognition theory, which posits that low-power individuals want their exchange partner to be trustworthy and then act according to that desire. Mediation analyses show that, consistent with the motivated cognition account, having low power increases individuals’ hope and, in turn, their perceptions of their exchange partners’ benevolence, which ultimately leads them to trust.
Trust is heritable, whereas distrust is not Reimann, Martin; Schilke, Oliver; Cook, Karen S.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
07/2017, Letnik:
114, Številka:
27
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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Why do people distrust others in social exchange? To what degree, if at all, is distrust subject to genetic influences, and thus possibly heritable, and to what degree is it nurtured by families and ...immediate peers who encourage young people to be vigilant and suspicious of others? Answering these questions could provide fundamental clues about the sources of individual differences in the disposition to distrust, including how they may differ from the sources of individual differences in the disposition to trust. In this article, we report the results of a study of monozygotic and dizygotic female twins who were asked to decide either how much of a counterpart player’s monetary endowment they wanted to take from their counterpart (i.e., distrust) or how much of their own monetary endowment they wanted to send to their counterpart (i.e., trust). Our results demonstrate that although the disposition to trust is explained to some extent by heritability but not by shared socialization, the disposition to distrust is explained by shared socialization but not by heritability. The sources of distrust are therefore distinct from the sources of trust in many ways.
Recent research on start-up accelerators has drawn attention to the central importance of social resource exchange among peers for entrepreneurial success. But such peer relationships contain both ...cooperative and competitive elements, making accelerators a prime example of a mixed-motive context in which successful generalized exchange—unilateral giving without expectations of direct reciprocity—is not a given. In our ethnographic study of a Silicon Valley accelerator, we sought to explore how generalized exchange emerges and evolves over time. Employing an abductive, sequential mixed-methods approach, we develop a process model that helps explain how a system of generalized exchange may or may not emerge. At the core of this model are the interaction rituals within social events that come to create distinct exchange expectations, which are either aligned or incompatible with generalized exchange, resulting in fulfilled or failed exchanges in subsequent encounters. Whereas fulfilled exchanges can kickstart virtuous exchange dynamics and a thriving generalized exchange system, failed exchanges trigger vicious exchange dynamics and an unstable social order. These findings bring clarity to the puzzle of how some generalized exchange systems overcome the social dilemma in mixed-motive contexts by highlighting the central role of alignment between structure and process.
Most research on trust in interorganizational relationships focuses on a single level of analysis, typically the individual or organizational level, and treats trust as a fairly static phenomenon. To ...stimulate more crosslevel research, we propose a theoretical model that explains how trust in interorganizational relationships is related across various levels of analysis. At the same time, our model emphasizes the dynamic aspect of trust by examining how trust develops throughout consecutive relationship stages. Drawing from several programs of research, we identify the mechanisms that drive the progression of trust across levels as the interorganizational relationship unfolds. Starting with the boundary spanner as the key individual at the beginning of a new collaboration, we specify how trust gradually becomes part of the fabric of organizational action. By integrating micro and macro approaches over time, the proposed model contributes to a better understanding of how trust evolves in interorganizational relationships.
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