Trust in Black America: Race, Discrimination, and Politics

2. Explaining Blacks’ (Dis)trust: A Theory of Discriminative Racial-Psychological Processing

24 | 2 Explaining Blacks’ (Dis)trust A Theory of Discriminative Racial-Psychological Processing The Significance and Meaning of Trust Trust is capital (Putnam 1993, 1995, 2000a). Anyone who is trusting, trustable , or trustworthy is empowered to fulfill actions on behalf of others, although fulfilling one’s self-interest often involves trust also being reciprocated by others (Coleman 1988, 1990; Putnam 2000a; Hardin 2001; Hoffman 2006). As an evaluation of one person about another person, entity, or context , trust involves the trustor (the person making the evaluation) making normative judgments about how the behavior of others (the trustees) should be conducted in social, political, or economic contexts. This evaluation also involves the trustor considering what should be the effect of that behavior on him or her personally. The general expectation is that people trust when they feel as if the trustee will not cause a negative outcome, especially one that will harm the trustor. Trust is not just an assessment. It is a belief about a person, institution, or context that stems from an assessment about who or what can deliver an outcome with the least harmful risk and with the greatest benefit to the trustor . There is a degree of uncertainty about outcomes being beneficial to the trustor, and whether trust can be garnered or sustained depends on the benefits outweighing the risks. In this sense, the trustor prefers avoiding harmful risks in order to incur from the trustee more beneficial outcomes such as cooperation, reciprocity, or tangible returns (Ostrom and Walker 2003; Hardin 2001; Heimer 2001; Warren 1999; Luhmann 1988). These trust calculations drive interpersonal, intergroup, and institutional relations, making trust invaluable for present and future relations. Trust’s worth depends on people’s expectations for trustworthiness, and people discriminate trust accordingly (Barber 1983; Hardin 2001, 2004, 2006; Explaining Blacks’ (Dis)trust | 25 Heimer 2001; Messick and Kramer 2001). Trust is the action, but trustworthiness is the characteristic that is judged relative to the trustor’s standards. To wit, people also have to trust the indicators that a person is trustworthy (Bacharach and Gambetta 2001). In my view, these trust indicators include the following: (1) behavior, (2) context, (3) perceived outcomes, and (4) perceived risks. As for the assessment of others’ behavior, people either consider others’ reputation or make a prediction about their prospective behavior on the basis of the information available to them. If information is scarce, then stereotypes convey data about others. In addition to behavioral information , people use the context of trust to assess their previous experiences (or reputation) in dealing with people in certain spaces and at different points in time (or history). On the basis of the calculation about whether the resultant trust outcome will be positive or negative for the trustor’s interests, the trustor evaluates how much (if at all) to trust others. Furthermore, the trustor weighs the perceived outcome with the probable risks that are associated with trusting the trustee. If the risks are higher for harming the trustor, then the trustor’s potential to trust decreases, and vice versa: if the risks are lower for harming the trustor, then the trustor’s potential to trust increases. Because people’s race affects how they are perceived to behave, where they are reputed to act in a given time period, how they are predicted to harm others or not, and how much they are predicted to harm others or not, race is a fundamental concept in understanding how and in whom people trust. Thus, race is integral to this book’s conceptual framework and study of trust. First, however, we must understand how social scientists generally conceptualize trust and what this means for our knowledge of the effect of race on trust. What We Know about Trust in America: Trust Trends and the Decline of Trust Scholars are interested in the study of trust because of the concern about what distrust can mean for sustaining democracy. For this reason, declining trust trends among all Americans have alarmed researchers (Hetherington 2005; Pew Research Center 2010b), and studies of trust have been attentive to political trust and social trust. Political science research, however, focuses more squarely on political trust (trust in political actors and institutions), with limited analysis of social trust (trust in people in general) and its greater implications for society. 26 | Explaining Blacks’ (Dis)trust As far as the trust that people have in government, political actors, and political institutions...