Trust and uncertainty: a critical re-assessment

Abstract

Under uncertainty, we never know for sure the precise boundaries of our warranted knowledge to be able to completely trust our judgments within its range. This poses a problem of substantiating our trusting attitudes in the absence of credible affirmative evidence. The functionalist understanding of trust as a device pruning down uncertainty and complexity of the outer world does not seem to be an adequate response, since it can bring about inferior outcomes, given the incompleteness of the agents’ knowledge. The challenge of human agency further complicates the issue of trust due to emerging uncertainty about the partners’ response to the initial act of trusting. Biases and illusions in surmising the others’ trustworthiness add to uncertainty and unpredictability of placing trust and show the danger of drawing inferences about the trustees’ motivation and reliability on purely subjective grounds.

Keywords:

• trust
• uncertainty
• complexity
• knowledge
• human agency

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Gráinne Collins, Denise Dollimore, Barbara Misztal, Eric Uslaner and participants at the annual conference of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (Maastricht, the Netherlands, November 2003) and the American Sociological Association (San Francisco, CA, August 2004) for their helpful comments on the earlier drafts of this paper. He is especially grateful to Geoffrey Hodgson for his valuable suggestions at different stages of this work. Usual disclaimer applies.

Notes

1. The term ‘negative capability’ was coined by John Keats. I owe Barbara Misztal for this argument.