Cooperation Without Trust?

2. Trustworthiness

20 Chapter 2 Trustworthiness T RUST IS unproblematic in a world in which everyone is trustworthy, but it is often not easy to know the extent to which others will be trustworthy with respect to matters of concern to us. They may turn out to be trustworthy in all respects, but we may not know that and may not be in a position to ever know it. In this book, we focus on how actors come to cooperate with and rely on each other even when they cannot expect each other to be trustworthy. The degree of uncertainty often determines the nature of the mechanisms put in place to guard against misjudged trust. Another key factor is the nature of what is at stake. If the stakes are high, we are much more likely to require that there be organizational or institutional mechanisms in place before we are willing to rely on others. In this chapter, we investigate trustworthiness: how we attempt to assess the trustworthiness of others; how our own characteristics make us more or less likely to take risks on others, especially those we do not know; and how various devices protect us against exploitation or betrayal . Our primary focus is on interpersonal relations, although in subsequent chapters we explore social devices at the organizational and institutional levels that facilitate reliability and cooperation in the absence of trust. To recapitulate the definition from chapter 1, trust in our framework is a three-part relation: an actor A trusts another actor B with respect to matter x or matters x . . . z in situation S. A is said to trust B (or an agent of a larger collectivity) in situation S when A believes that B is trustworthy with respect to the matters at hand (x . . . z). In particular, A believes that B’s interests encapsulate her own interests. This implies that A knows or can assess the trustworthiness of B with respect to x in situations like S. Judgments about the trustworthiness of B involve judgments made by A (the truster) based on the assessments of B (the trusted) of the nature of x (the focus or object of the trust relation) and of features of the situation S in which the relation is embedded. The focus of much of the psychological work on trust is the individual , not the social relation or social structure in which the individual is embedded. This is especially true of models of trust based on the morality or psychological dispositions of the potential trusted party. We discuss some of this psychological work and its limitations before moving to the focus of the book: the more relational analysis of trust and trustworthiness . The role of psychology is to give us a window into the cognitive elements involved in assessments of trustworthiness and the characteristics of the truster that may make trust more likely to develop under some circumstances. We take trustworthiness to have a meaning that is relevant to the theory or conception of trust with which it is used. As we argue, people can be reliable for many reasons, including the mere compatibility of their incentives with our own. Those incentives can be imposed on them by us or by organizations of various kinds. Or they can just happen to be the same as ours. We say that someone is trustworthy, however, only if they are morally committed to being so, have a disposition to maintain a trustworthy character, or encapsulate our interests. The last of these characteristics makes trustworthiness a relational concept, just as trust as encapsulated interest is relational. A person can be trustworthy to us but not to others. The other two ways of being trustworthy are not relational in this way. Someone who is trustworthy in some respect is also reliable in that respect, but the converse is not true. One can be reliable without being trustworthy in any of the three senses here. First, we discuss the characteristics of the truster (A) that are related to risk-taking and may facilitate or hinder the development of trusting relations . Next, we focus on A’s assessments of the person potentially to be trusted (B), and we discuss determinants of the accuracy of such judgments . Before examining how features of the situation S or the social context affect the possibility of trust, we discuss how the nature of the relationship between A and B affects A’s assessments of B’s trustworthiness. We acknowledge the reciprocal dependence and interdependent...