Communicating (about) trust

It feels strange to introduce this issue of Journal of Trust Research (JTR) as its content was created before COVID-19 hit us all, but one is tempted to read it through a Corona lens. And, once again, in difficult times, when trust also tends to be difficult, our voices as trust researchers may be particularly sought after. Future JTR issues will certainly reflect this. But let us acknowledge first that members of our community have been affected individually in various ways in recent months. The JTR Editorial Team hopes that all our friends and supporters are well. As an international community, we have been able to stay connected via digital media almost like before, perhaps even more so. But the offline meetings and discussions about our topic are sorely missed. Seeing faces on video conferencing tiles is simply not the same thing. FINT – The First Network on Trust – just announced that due to the pandemic, its 11th Workshop on Trust Within and Between Organisations, planned for March 2021 at the University of South Carolina, had to be rescheduled provisionally to 10-12 November 2021. Let’s look at it this way: We will meet again!

Moreover, there is good news for JTR, so welcome when so much else worries us. Earlier this year, the journal has been accepted into the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), the database that sits just below the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). This means that JTR content is fully indexed in the Web of Science starting from Volume 7, Issue 1 (2017). We will not have an official Impact Factor yet, but are reviewed periodically and can qualify for a promotion into a subject category in the SSCI with an official Impact Factor. This is a great step forward for JTR, but it also means that citations will be even more important for us now in order to move up from ESCI to SSCI. High-impact articles for the forthcoming issues will be crucial, too, and we are pleased to announce that JTR has a new, greatly improved and much more author-friendly article submission interface. Any feedback on ESCI and the new interface will be much appreciated by the Editorial Team as will be the intensive use of JTR’s content by way of citation.

As I give you a preview of the current issue now, I will try to avoid the Corona lens, in order not to distort the authors’ work, except where the connection seems obvious. ‘We can’t go on together with suspicious minds’, starts the title of the first article by Christopher P. Reinders Folmer, David De Cremer, Maarten Wubben and Marius van Dijke on forecasting errors in evaluating the appreciation of denials. It deals with intriguing aspects of suspicion and denial with the basic message: For regaining trust, it is worth making (honest) denials rather that assuming that denials will not change people's minds. This goes against the idea that when (falsely) implicated in some sort of wrongdoing, one should better keep silent in order to avoid being associated with the matter and stigmatised even when innocent. Instead this article suggests: ‘If you didn't do it, say it!’ Reinders Folmer et al. (2020) present elaborate lab studies beyond this, but it is a take-away that I find particularly interesting, because it points to the problem of how we communicate about trust-related issues.

The second article by Robert R. Martin is a multilevel study of ‘international variations in fiduciary and competence trust of physicians’ (Martin, 2020). Based on representative data from 26 countries, Martin finds that fiduciary trust in physicians by patients is significantly stronger in countries with predominantly tax-funded primary care systems and both fiduciary trust and competence trust are weaker where patients pay a large part of total health spending themselves. These finding could be important, I think, if we want to explain why patients are willing to cooperate with the health system, let’s say when asked to undergo virus testing, or not. Moreover, it seems to me that the system ‘communicates’ what kind of physician–patient relationship is presumed. Where patients have to pay a bill after every examination or treatment, even if refunded, the physician’s monetary interest is emphasized, and generalised solidarity deemphasized, compared to a setting where everyone knows that the medical personnel needs to make a living, but this stays mostly in the background whilst the interaction is about caring and helping. Transparency, here, might prove to be a double-edged sword once again. Communicating costs is not necessarily conducive for trusting, it seems to me, according to Martin’s (2020) results.

Contracts are essentially a communication tool, too. Markus Järvinen and Minna Branders examine how contracts thus might become ‘trust builders’ (Järvinen & Branders, 2020). They emphasize the notion that contracts have a framing effect on trust and in the empirical part of their article they analyze contracts of the Finnish Defence Forces with their civilian contractors. Regarding communicative aspects of trusting, it is interesting that the authors conclude that ‘trust building would benefit if contracts were improved […] by establishing fewer forums of communication, [but also] more communication via avenues other than key personnel, […] and using contracts to pursue a certain culture’ (Järvinen & Branders, 2020, p. 46, emphasis added). This implies that formal contracts convey expectations about the less formal aspects of a relationship, too, which is why they can be seen as ‘trust builders’.

Next, Kostis and Näsholm (2020) offer a systematic literature review on trust and distrust in the context of coopetition. A key observation is the much neglected role of distrust besides trust in coopetitive relationships and, in particular, its ‘potential fruitfulness’. To pick just one of the many aspects within the various avenues for further research suggested by the authors, I think that the effect of differences in partners’ perceptions of the relationship are particularly worth studying. Wherever perceptions are at play – that is, most of the time, if only because perceived trustworthiness has been such a fundamental construct in trust research – I would also see a strong connection to communication. After all, what we perceive is shaped at least partly by what the other side tells or signals to us. And it also includes that one can ask back and communicate perhaps about the limits of trust or the benefits from retaining a certain level of distrust with partners especially in inherently paradoxical coopetitive relations.

If ‘communication’ can serve as a theme connecting, somewhat forced, the contributions to this JTR issue, then the article by Wubs-Mrozewicz (2020) is the one that most clearly fits this theme and even offers a new conceptual angle. It is the first JTR article written by a historian and Wubs-Mrozewicz not only gives us an idea of how trust mattered in premodern times, but she also uses the concept of ‘language of trust and trustworthiness’ that could be highly useful in contemporary trust research, too. I can picture very well a linguistic turn whereby we take a closer look at how people talk about trust in order to understand the specific meaning of trust in different settings and that we also analyze trust as a rhetoric device in relationships. Trust is mostly at the back of people’s minds and when they talk explicitly about trust, it often indicates that there could be a problem (such as the plea ‘Trust me’ in response to apparently faltering trust). All the more, the critical incidents when trust is put into words, where it is to be conveyed and negotiated by language, can tell us a lot about social relationships and how trust ‘works’ in them. And in critical times such as now with the Corona pandemic, we might pay a lot of attention to who claims what kind of trust or trustworthiness.

Last but not least, Reinhard Bachmann has reviewed Masamichi Sasaki’s volume Trust in Contemporary Society, a collection of original chapters by authors from various social sciences, including prominent contributors such as Bart Nooteboom, Barbara Misztal and Piotr Sztompka, among others. Bachmann (2020, p. 110) concludes: ‘It is well worth reading and offers a pleasant way to recap some old issues and to reflect on some new ideas which trust research might focus on in the future.’ For me, having contributed to the book, it is a precious souvenir of the international conference Sasaki organised at Chuo University in Tokyo, 18–20 November 2017. I cherish the fact that many participants at this event came from the Eastern European and Asian research communities that are less present at the, admittedly, more ‘Western’ conferences that I have tended to go to. Sasaki has done a great service to the global trust research community by inviting us to Japan. If only such inspiring communicative events would be possible again soon.

The current JTR issue with such a varied set of original contributions to trust research, once again, has only been possible with the guidance of dedicated Associate Editors. The Editorial Team is most grateful to Cecily Cooper, Steven Lui, Bo Bernhard Nielsen and Michele Williams as well as the anonymous reviewers who have been involved in the publication process of the articles published in this issue. I would also like to thank explicitly the editors and reviewers who have given constructive feedback to submissions that ultimately did not get accepted. It has been a pleasure to work with all authors and it is always exciting to learn together about the insights and relevance of trust research. Cecily Cooper has been an exceptional advisor in this respect. She has stepped down from her role as Associate Editor after having supported the journal form the early days. I am grateful for all her editorial contributions and glad to know that, when needed, JTR can count on her esteemed collegial and friendly advice in the future, too. Communicating (about) trust goes on.