Trust as a Social Reality

Abstract

Although trust is an underdeveloped concept in sociology, promising theoretical formulations are available in the recent work of Luhmann and Barber. This sociological version complements the psychological and attitudinal conceptualizations of experimental and survey researchers. Trust is seen to include both emotional and cognitive dimensions and to function as a deep assumption underwriting social order. Contemporary examples such as lying, family exchange, monetary attitudes, and litigation illustrate the centrality of trust as a sociological reality. In recent years, sociologists have begun to treat trust as a sociological topic (e.g., Conviser; Garfinkel; Haas and Deseran; Henslin; Holzner; Strub and Priest; Weigert,a,b). Indeed, two short and powerful books, Niklas Luhmann's Trust and Pauoer (1979) and Bernard Barber's The Logic and Limits of Trust (1983), have placed trust at the center of sociological theorizing about contemporary society. Nevertheless, we agree with Luhmann's lament that there is a regrettably sparse literature which has trust as its main theme within (8). There is a large quantity of research on trust by experimental psychologists and political scientists, which, however, appears theoretically unintegrated and incomplete from the standpoint of a sociology of trust. These researchers typically conceptualize trust as a psychological event within the individual rather than as an intersubjective or systemic social reality. They also tend to use methodological approaches that reduce trust to its cognitive content through psychometric scaling techniques or to its behavioral expressions in laboratory settings. Luhmann and Barber, on the other hand, present trust as an irreducible and multidimiensional so