Trust in Social Interaction: From Dyads to Civilizations

Abstract

Human trust can be construed as a heuristic wager on the predictability and benevolence of others, within a compatible worldview. A leap of faith across gaps in information. Generally, we posit that trust constitutes a functional bridge between individual and group homeostasis, by helping minimize energy consumed in continuously monitoring the behavior of others and verifying their assertions, thus reducing group complexity and facilitating coordination. Indeed, we argue that trust is crucial to the formation and maintenance of collective entities. However, the wager that trust represents in the face of uncertainty leaves the possibility of misallocated trust, which can result in maladaptive outcomes for both individuals and groups. More specifically, trust can be thought of as a scale-invariant property of minimizing prediction error within ascending levels of social hierarchy ranging from individual brains to dyads, groups and societies, and ultimately civilizations. This framework permits us to examine trust from multiple perspectives at once, relating homeostasis, subjective affect and predictive processing/active inference at the individual level, with complexity and homeostasis at the collective level. We propose trust as a paradigmatic instance of an intrinsically dialectical phenomenon bridging individual and collective levels of organization, one that can be observed in daily experience and empirically studied in the real world. Here, we suggest collective psychophysiology as a promising paradigm for studying the multiscale dynamics of trust. We conclude with discussing how our integrative approach could help shine light on not only the bright but also the dark sides of trust.