On the cross-domain scholarship of trust in the institutional context

Abstract

As argued throughout this volume, trust matters. This importance has spawned a number of major contemporary efforts to increase trust in numerous domains. These efforts typically seek to leverage the best available science for understanding and motivating trust but it is, as yet, not well understood to what degree trust is essentially the same or importantly different across the various domains. Trust building efforts are, therefore, often left with little guidance as to the critical issues to address when applying work from other domains. This chapter takes up this deficiency by reviewing the major mainstream conceptualizations, antecedents, and outcomes of trust in four domains: public administration, policing, state courts, and medicine. The chapter concludes that trust is in fact notably similar across domains but that there are critical differences to be attended to. Specifically, we argue that trust across contexts can be thought of as a willingness to accept vulnerability in dealings with an "other" but that the most important drivers of that willingness are likely to vary somewhat as a function of the domain.