Although it has been demonstrated that fear is related to various types of trust, less is known about the generalizability of relationships across contexts. Crime is a universal social and political problem that imposes harm on both individuals and the social order; as such, it can affect attitudes in a similar way across different contexts. Since the way in which people base their trust is relational, I argue that we need to treat social, political, and order-institutional types of trust separately in relation to fear of crime. Using data from 23 European countries, I test my claims about the strength and impact of the three relationships. My results reveal a clear and consistent negative relationship between fear of crime and levels of social trust, but not between fear of crime and levels of political or order-institutional trust. This relationship holds in cross-national comparisons for social trust, whereas associations with political and order-institutional trust vary across countries. These findings underscore the need for trust research to distinguish between different forms of trust when assessing how fear shapes the social and institutional foundations of democratic societies.
In this paper we study how market institutions affect trust in people we don't know. We show evidence that trust increases with deeper market depth in countries with strong protection of contracts. However, the trust and market-depth institutions relation is negative in countries where enforcement of contracts is poor. Our results contribute to the literature in providing evidence of heterogeneous effects regarding the relation between trust and market-depth institutions. Therefore, deepening market-depth institutions may either reinforce or weaken trust on strangers, and, at the end, this relation depends on how much institutions ensure enforcement of agreements among strangers.
In the last decade, trust-based governance approaches have gained prominence in public administration as a means of enhancing motivation, cooperation and effectiveness. However, the development of trust across different layers in multi-level organisations is particularly complex. Top-level leadership must be willing to make itself vulnerable despite being unable to interact directly with the entire organisation to assess staff trustworthiness. Moreover, while intra-organisational trust may emerge from the interplay between institutional and interactional trust, it remains unclear how this interplay can be effectively orchestrated across organisational levels. This observation begs the question: How can top-level leadership build intra-organisational trust across hierarchical levels? This article explores an empirical case in which top-level leadership successfully advanced intra-organisational trust across municipal levels. Based on analysis of the interplay among different forms of trust, the study identifies three central factors that explain how top-level leadership successfully developed trust. These include an initial act of trust by top-level leaders, a mutually reinforcing interplay between institutional and interactional trust, and the establishment of dialogue-supporting structures that enabled interactional trust to emerge. The article offers recommendations for practitioners and underscores the need for further research in trust development across multiple levels.
This study examines trust in government as a mediating psychological mechanism linking economic ideology and tax knowledge to redistributive perceptions. Drawing on Social Exchange Theory (SET), the research conceptualises redistributive support as a relational outcome shaped by cognitive, ideological, and institutional factors. Using data from 208 Indonesian undergraduate taxation students and applying Covariance-Based Structural Equation Modeling (CB-SEM), the findings show that both pro-redistributive economic ideology and higher tax knowledge significantly enhance support for redistribution. Importantly, trust in government partially mediates these relationships, indicating that ideological alignment and fiscal literacy alone are insufficient without institutional credibility. The results highlight trust as a key psychological conduit through which beliefs and knowledge translate into favorable evaluations of redistributive policies. The study advances theoretical understanding by integrating behavioural and relational perspectives into fiscal attitude research and provides empirical insights from a developing economy context characterised by evolving institutional trust. Policy implications emphasise the importance of strengthening institutional transparency and tax education to foster sustainable public support for equitable fiscal systems. These findings contribute to interdisciplinary debates on taxpayer psychology and the legitimacy of redistributive governance.
Online intermediaries and algorithmic technologies, such as platforms or AI, remediated and with it, transformed many of our social, economic, and political relations. This transformation of relationships also affects the trust which makes these relations possible, and which emerges through these interactions and beyond. We argue that digital technologies remediate trust, and in doing so, they produce new risks and vulnerabilities while redistribute old ones. We use six domains to illustrate how interpersonal and institutional trust are transformed through digital remediation. By reviewing contemporary literature on the impact of digital technologies on institutional and interpersonal trust, this article offers a new approach to conceptualising how trust mediators operate, how they succeed and fail to absorb and redistribute risks. The findings serve as an important stepping stone to identify new directions for a theoretical framework on trust in the digital society.
Prior work suggests that loneliness is associated with a threat-sensitive cognitive style and that news media is often threat-focused and politically polarised. With this in mind, the present study develops and tests a model of loneliness, trust in news media and intolerance of political out-groups. We hypothesised that the more subjectively lonely a person is, the more politically intolerant they are, and that this relationship is moderated by trust in news media. To examine this, we conducted an online survey with 1,335 adults from the United States of America. Results suggested that trust in news media moderates the relationship between loneliness and two dimensions of intolerance: (a) intolerance towards out-group political affiliates, and (b) intolerance towards supporters of out-group political candidates. There was a direct effect of loneliness on both dimensions of intolerance; but that effect was stronger the higher the level of reported trust in news media. These findings lend support to a risk model of intolerance, and contributes to our understanding of how exposure to (and trust in) news media may interact with loneliness in ways that radicalise individuals against political out-groups.
Over the past decade, Western societies have experienced an expansion of economic risks at the same time as citizens' political trust has come under pressure. A common assumption in previous research is that perceived economic risks reduce political trust. This paper presents a novel theoretical argument for the reversed causal pathway where political trust is seen as a coping-mechanism for expected economic risks. We test this argument using panel data and statistical models equipped to isolate this specific causal pathway running from trust to economic risks. Our findings demonstrate that political trust reduces perceptions of economic risks, in particular for people with high normative welfare state beliefs. As such, we contribute to the burgeoning literatures on the interplay between political attitudes and economic risks and on the consequences of political trust.
Given the increased significance of public trust in science, unanswered questions arise about which trust groups exist within the public, how they vary in their use of science-related (digital) media and how they may change over time. This study examined public trust in science in Germany through a two-wave panel survey (nw1 = 4,440; nw2 = 1,028). Five distinct trust groups were identified in a Latent Profile Analysis based on evaluations of scientists' expertise, integrity, benevolence, transparency and dialogue orientation. The groups showed similar patterns of trust, with high values for expertise in each case, but at varying levels. The groups further differed in terms of contact with science. After one year, the data revealed a tendency towards a moderate level of trust in science, with fully and highly trusting groups experiencing decreased trust and (rather) untrusting groups seeing an increase. The results may indicate a return to the mean as a waning effect at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. Cultural specificity and comparisons to theoretical types of trust in science are addressed.
This study examines how the alignment of ethnic origin and gender in school classes affects adolescents' social trust. We argue that adolescents whose co-ethnic classmates tend to be of a different gender than classmates of other ethnic origin are less likely to trust unknown others - compared to students in classes where both boys and girls are well represented within their ethnic ingroup and outgroup. Moreover, previous scholarship suggests this impact of attribute alignment to vary between ethnic majority and minority students, as majority students' higher levels of social trust may be particularly reduced by the experience of attribute alignment. We evaluate these hypotheses using data from a large-scale school survey among 8th-grade students in Germany. Our analyses show that the alignment of ethnic origin and gender in the school class reduces generalised trust in people as well as context-specific trust in unknown grade mates among majority students, whereas for minority students no significant relationship was found.
The changing consumer environment is increasing the risks consumers navigate, making trust in brands more important than ever. Researchers have developed a variety of scales, each operationalising brand trust differently. This diversity can lead to inconsistencies in research findings, making it difficult to compare results across studies and limiting cumulative knowledge-building. However, to date, little attention has been given to critically reviewing how well these measures align with theoretical conceptualisations of brand trust. To advance a coherent understanding of brand trust and theoretical development, alignment of theory and operationalisation is essential. This article reviews brand trust scales used over the past five years, a period of substantial growth in research on the topic, and highlights current practices in measuring brand trust. Utilising the trust-as-process framework, this review assesses the most widely used scales to identify the elements of brand trust they measure. Our findings reveal inconsistencies in the measurement of brand trust, with some measures conflating perceived trustworthiness and trusting intentions under the broader concept of brand trust. By clarifying these distinctions, we provide guidance for researchers on selecting appropriate scales based on the specific trust element they aim to measure, enhancing precision and clarity in brand trust research.
This article examines the relationship of trust and vulnerability in medieval theology and literature, focusing on Julian of Norwich's Revelations and William Langland's Piers Plowman. Drawing on theological frameworks such as deus absconditus (the hidden God) alongside insights from attachment theory and developmental psychology, the paper introduces the concept of perspectival vulnerability: the fragility that arises from one's inability to access the intentions or perspective of the other, especially in divine-human relationships. The analysis begins with early trust formation in the works of D.W. Winnicott, Jean Piaget, Anthony Giddens, and Edward Tronick, illuminating how presence, absence, and responsiveness share a capacity for trust. These psychological insights provide a foundation for understanding how medieval texts explore the emotional and epistemic demands of sustained trust, especially in the 'vulnerability phase', as theorised by Ballinger and colleagues. Julian's visions emphasise the vertical dimension, in which trust in God persists despite divine hiddenness and limited reassurance. Langland's allegory shifts to the horizontal, illustrating the risks and ethical negotiations of interpersonal trust within a fractured social world. By reframing vulnerability as a relational and epistemological condition, this article shows how late medieval texts dramatise the experience of trust not as a single leap but as a temporally extended posture, held open by literary and devotional practice. In doing so, these texts remain resonant for contemporary discussions of trust, faith, risk, and relational ethics.
This paper argues that a trust violation can harm the trusting party directly and also damage relationships. Trusting parties are vulnerable to these two harms in addition to and separate from (what this paper refers to as) material harm - the direct and indirect effect(s) of B not doing X, when A trusted B to do X (for A). Put directly, the point is that trust violation is itself a harm separate from any effect of the trusted party B not doing X. This argument depends on adopting a commitment conception of trust; the second section outlines that conception and the reasons for adopting it. And this argument applies a distinction drawn in the philosophical literature between expressive harm and material harm, summarised in the third section. The fourth section defends the account developed here, responding to a recent paper also focused on relationships in trust violations, one that argues that commitments do not play a role in trust.
This paper examines how vulnerability as a social phenomenon is displayed, negotiated and managed in social interaction, and offers new insights into the micro-foundations of trust. Drawing on ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA), we analyse naturally occurring encounters between social work professionals and individuals in vulnerable positions. Our analyses show how relational situated vulnerability is both displayed and topicalised, and how trust emerges in encounters not as a stable belief or disposition, but as a situated, relational accomplishment. We show how a range of interactional resources are used to manage vulnerability, jointly shape the moral and relational dynamics of the encounter, and calibrate the interlocutors' trustworthiness. Our study contributes to trust and vulnerability research by (a) introducing the concept of observable vulnerability; (b) showing how individuals display, topicalise and minimise vulnerability in interaction; and c) demonstrating how interpersonal vulnerability dynamics are constructed through the interactants' 'trust work' in asymmetrical institutional settings, and how this affects local trust production. We argue that this interactional perspective can enrich traditional trust research by informing the design of surveys, experiments and mixed-methods studies, and that it offers a bridge between micro-level interactional detail and macro-level theorising about trust in institutional and everyday life.
Theoretical works on trust and vulnerability, especially those influenced by phenomenological and ethnomethodological traditions, denote the importance of taken-for-granted assumptions in how people come to trust and distrust and how they experience vulnerability. Yet these implicit assumptions remain under-examined through empirical studies in healthcare settings, not least because their very taken-for-grantedness makes these lifeworld phenomena challenging to research. In this article we explore the utility of a longitudinal approach for illuminating some of the taken-for-granted roots of trust and their complex relationship to multiple vulnerabilities. Longitudinal qualitative approaches to trust have been under-utilised but enable researchers to explore how the roots of trust sometimes become exposed as assumptions shift, or suddenly become questioned, over time. By following the narratives of a single individual at regular time points across 30 months, we explore how her trust and distrust in different mental healthcare settings were interwoven with and shaped by trust and distrust in relation to work-place, legal and other system contexts, as well as her fluctuating trust and distrust in herself. A loss of ontological security following an unexpected termination of her work contract gradually rendered an array of assumptions about deference to authority, gendered role expectations, legal justice, and the influence of these assumptions upon her trust, distrust and vulnerability more explicit. By illuminating these lifeworld structures and their influence over different interpersonal and system-oriented trust and distrust relations over time, this study contributes to conceptualising the taken-for-granted bases of trust and the value of longitudinal qualitative designs.
Although the trust literature provides valuable insights into how vulnerability is experienced and managed, it does so largely through a dyadic relational view. In this view, the trustee's characteristics and actions are positioned as the primary source of risk, and vulnerability is conceptualised as a relatively static, situational condition. While useful, this paper argues that the dyadic view offers a narrow account of how vulnerability is experienced, overlooking notably the trustors' broader relational embeddedness. Drawing on Sloterdijk's Spherology (1998, 1999, 2004), the paper advances a shift to a spherical relational view, emphasising that trustors inhabit multiple overlapping 'life worlds' (e.g. work, family, friendships). In this view, a trustor's vulnerability is shaped not only by the given interaction, but also by prior and ongoing experiences across interconnected relational spheres. Trustors 'gather' risk experiences across spheres and merge these into the context with the trustee, forming a spatially grounded (i.e. embodied) and multiplex vulnerability disposition. The paper introduces the concept of contextualised vulnerability to capture this dynamic, situated experience. Doing so, it redefines vulnerability not as a passive condition but as an actively cultivated capacity for trust, offering an embodied understanding of trustor agency and building trust in complex and uncertain environments.
The present work brings together perspectives from trust and the self-regulation literature to investigate how people's regulatory focus, a form of self-regulation and motivational orientation, relates to their generalised trust. Regulatory focus theory distinguishes between two different ways that humans can self-regulate and pursue their goals: a prevention orientation (i.e. greater focus on security, ought goals, and a loss-avoidance mindset) and a promotion orientation (i.e. greater focus on growth, ideal goals, and a gain-approach mindset). People usually show a greater tendency towards one of the two orientations which can be assessed via self-reported questionnaire (often referred to as chronic regulatory focus). A secondary analysis of nine correlational studies, combined in a small-scale meta-analysis (N = 6422), revealed a positive relationship between chronic promotion focus and generalised trust, r = .11, 95% CI [.083, .131] and a significantly larger negative relationship between chronic prevention focus and generalised trust, r = -.22, 95% CI [-.237, -.191]. A second, preregistered study (N = 478) replicated these findings on a measure of self-reported generalised trust and on trusting (cooperative) behaviour in a trust game. The present findings further our understanding of the nomological network of generalised trust. They also expand the theoretical boundaries of regulatory focus theory, highlight distinctions between conceptualisations and measures of regulatory focus, and underscore its implications for understanding the social psychological foundations of trust.
