ABSTRACT
Trust and distrust are expectations about the kind of relationship that one will likely have with another person or an organization. 1 This chapter discusses the psychological processes involved in arriving at these expectations. Consider that you have just learned from the newspaper that the officials of a local hazardous industrial facility previously unknown to you have been discovered concealing poor safety records. You also learn that the city government is currently negotiating evacuation plans with managers of the facility to be used should a major industrial accident occur. Certain options for the emergency preparations could be very costly to the company owning the facility. To what extent do you think the facility managers can be trusted to negotiate in the interests of the community? Even though there is very little information available, I venture most of us are able to make such an attribution about trust. Moreover, we do it rapidly and with little hesitation. From a phenomenological point of view the making of such attributions of trust seems so automatic and natural we might ask ‘What is there to explain?’ This chapter is one analytic effort to answer this question. The chapter is based on the assumption that the effort to systematically understand social trust attributions not only advances our general understanding of social trust but can provide insights useful to risk managers concerned about social trust.
