ABSTRACT
Trust has attracted great interest for its potential role in both general social interaction and the specific activities involved with managing (preventing, reducing, avoiding, etc.) hazards of various kinds. Much research on the latter topic has focused on how much particular actors (eg, government, industry, environmentalists, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy) are trusted, the origins of such trust, and how trust judgements affect estimates and evaluations of risk, among other outcomes. My focus here is on whether our understanding of the role and nature of trust would benefit from exploring how the trust judge conceives of the system of hazard managers. I shall attempt to show that this neglected issue raises some useful questions about the motivations and processes of trust judgements.
