Whom Can We Trust?: How Groups, Networks, and Institutions Make Trust Possible

Introduction

Introduction 1 A S MATTHEW CLEARY and Susan Stokes have noted (2006), the Russell Sage Foundation Trust Project has produced three key innovations: the change in focus from trust to trustworthiness (Hardin 2002; Cook, Hardin, and Levi 2005), the recognition that trust is only one of many potential sources of cooperative behavior (Cook, Hardin, and Levi 2005), and the reminder that in many strategic situations actors are better served by skepticism or a healthy level of distrust than trust (Braithwaite and Levi 1998; Cleary and Stokes 2006; Cook, Hardin, and Levi 2005). The chapters in this volume develop these themes by exploring them in a wide array of settings, at very different levels of analysis, and with varied disciplinary lenses. Theorists often assume that trust is critical to managing everyday affairs in politics, business, and social life. Some even go as far as declaring trust as necessary and good. But these claims, both empirical and normative, have not been fully put to the test in the social science of trust. Trust cannot be good in contexts in which it is not merited. To trust strangers, for example, is taking a risk that may end badly, as many of those who enter social or economic relationships mediated by the Internet can attest. And certainly we would not say in normative language that trust in such contexts is inherently of value. As Russell Hardin clearly argued, we might desire those we interact with to be trustworthy, and that might generally be good for society, but we can make no such general claim about trust (2002). The chapters included in part I of this volume develop this insight more fully by clarifying the conditions under which we find others to be trustworthy and on what bases. Part II treats trust as mediated by organizations and networks providing the context in which trust extends our 2 Whom Can We Trust? capacity to engage with one another over matters of substance. Part III moves up a level of analysis to spell out the institutional backing required for relations of trust and cooperation more generally. Here we also see the causal role of trust at the macro level addressed. There is a natural progression of the work reported in this volume, from interpersonal and intergroup relations to larger scale organizations, social networks, and institutions. At each level, the authors address key issues in the formation and role of trust in various social and cultural contexts. Too much of the recent literature on trust treats trust as necessary for cooperation. The more nuanced understanding of trust advanced in the Russell Sage Foundation research program reveals the multiple sources of cooperation. It also provides an advance in understanding what sources are likely to matter under what conditions and with what sets of actors. By more adequately theorizing interpersonal trust, it is obvious that it is but one among many sources of cooperation. Moreover, it is neither always available nor always preferable as a basis for cooperation. In some circumstances, interpersonal trust may actually be an impediment. Although the distinction between bonding and bridging social capital captures one aspect of when networks of trust and reciprocity produce exclusionary cooperation (Putnam 2000), it does not go far enough in revealing the dynamics of interaction and intergroup relations. Here the considerable advances in social psychology, particularly those derived from the experimental tradition of research represented in part I, provide clear evidence of the conditions under which relations of trust emerge between persons and members of groups distinguished by different status markers. One of the major emphases of the Trust Project has been on situations in which ethnic, racial, or other markers facilitate certain kinds of trust relationships while inhibiting others and when they do not. For example, evidence of the trustworthiness of white police in black neighborhoods (Tyler and Huo 2002) or of middle-class government agents with working class clients (Peel 1998) may foster cooperation and ameliorate power relationships between street-level bureaucrats and those they are meant to serve (Lipsky 1980). In other instances, intraethnic relationships are themselves problematic. Often when immigrants are victimized it is by the conationals on whom the newer arrivals depend and whom they initially believed trustworthy (Nee and Sanders 2000). Sometimes the immigrants are simply calculating that the potential return is worth the risk of exploitation. Sometimes they have no choice given conditions in their home countries, but sometimes they are mistaken in their assessments of the trustworthiness of those with whom they are...