ABSTRACT
It’s Friday night, and after a long week at work followed by hectic evenings with your child, you and your spouse decide you’d like an evening alone together and hire a baby sitter to watch your child. You have placed a great deal of trust in the sitter to take care of your child despite such potential risks as the sitter’s neglecting your child’s needs, allowing your child to do something dangerous, or worse yet, abusing him or her. As Deutsch (1958) suggested when he first presented this example, trust is evident only in situations where the potential damage from unfulfilled trust is greater than the potential gains if trust is fulfilled. With this assertion, he has captured two themes that have pervaded research and thinking regarding trust ever since: Trust entails the assumption of risks, and some form of trust is inherent in all relationships.
