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  • The Social Dynamics of Trust: Theoretical and Empirical Research, 1985–20121
  • J. David Lewis and Andrew J. Weigert

A phenomenology of everyday life reveals trust as an irreducibly social foundation of interaction in the lifeworld (Weigert 1981:77, 80ff; Weigert 1983:180ff). As such, trust is an objective social reality not reducible to individualistic psychological factors (Lewis and Smith 1980; Kasperson, Golding and Tuler 2005:33–35). This holistic turn adds theoretical robustness and scope to the construct of trust as a social a priori for all levels of social interaction, whether deeply interpersonal or globally transnational in character (Lewis and Weigert 1985b). Trust as a realist social a priori remains relevant throughout emerging sociohistorical eras, such as an aborning global and cosmopolitan postmodern society, wherein cooperative actions may afford realist possibilities of trust emerging among contemporaries who know each other as strangers (Weigert 2012).

As postmodern society has generated both new opportunities and new challenges to trust at the interpersonal, organizational and cultural levels, cross-disciplinary research has intensified in all these areas (cf. Lane 2001). The brilliant theoretical insights pioneered by Georg Simmel and Niklas Luhmann that stimulated our early 1980’s interest in trust have been carried forward most forcefully in recent years by Guido Möllering (2001a, 2006). Möllering (2006) also provides a critical assessment of other contemporary concepts of trust that, as Weber and Carter (2002) have noted, offer multiple definitions that are built on a highly rational idea of trust qua expectation.

The more rationalistic concept of trust contrasts to our traditional Simmelian view that the rational/cognitive dimension of trust is systemically related to both an emotional dimension and a behavioral dimension. Job (2005:5) similarly writes: “Few researchers see trust as a blend of the rational and the relational, for example, Lewis and Weigert (1985), and Dunn (2000, p. 76), who defines trust as both a ‘passion’, which is the ‘confident expectation of benign intentions in another free agent’, and a ‘modality of action’ which allows people to ‘cope with uncertainty over time.”

In his review of Piotr Sztompka’s (1999) Trust: A Sociological Theory, Möllering (2001b) captures this contrast in more figurative imagery: [End Page 25]

Finally, consider once more the sculpture of the ‘Illuminated Crowd’ shown on the cover of the book. One interpretation was that the light guides the crowd away from darkness; and Sztompka’s theory suggests that trust can be part of the classic source of enlightenment – human reason. Related to this is the notion of human control: if trust is functionally and instrumentally rational, then it is also controlling and controlled. However, is there not another view that conceptualizes trust as a response to the impossibility of control? In the words of Lewis and Weigert (1985:976): ‘Trust begins where prediction ends’. This is not the place to begin an alternative theory of trust, so let me just hint at what it might entail by referring to another interpretation of Mason’s sculpture (one close to the artist’s own interpretation). The illuminated crowd does not move towards the light, but undulates between light and darkness along ‘degrees of emotion’: illumination, hope, interest, hilarity, irritation, fear, sickness, hunger, violence, murder, and death (Edwards 1994:163). Trust is a phenomenon that embodies this human condition: the availability of some knowledge (light) on the one hand, and ‘the power of the unknown [shadows] in everyday reality’ (Edwards 1994:164) on the other.

In summary, we agree with Weber and Carter (2002), who draw from G.H. Mead and others, that trust is a foundational orientation between self and other. This orientation encompasses all three modes of human experience – emotion, cognition and behavior – standing in systemic and reciprocal reflexive relationships.

The Reflexive Relationship Between Emotional Trust and Cognitive Trust

Barbalet (2009) clarifies the reflexive interactions between the emotional and rational dimensions of trust. Like other irreducibly social emotions (e.g., shame, guilt, loyalty), the emotional content of trust is emergent and nontransitive. It involves a feeling of self-trust as well as other-trust, and this is why, when trust is betrayed, the emotional pain of self-reproach is experienced side-by-side with strong emotions...

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