Trust in the twenty-first century

Abstract

During the later half of the twenty-first century, conceptions of authority have been dominated by instrumentalist-based models. However, as society has seen a shift from compliance to cooperation, the instrumentalist model does not seem to explain why people cooperate. This shift has led to a motive-based model, which focuses largely on trust. Trust seems to be a motivating factor in explaining cooperation, particularly in that it motivates people to engage in actions, institutions to have discretion to take actions, and authorities to motivate actions. However, while there are clear implications for cooperation from a lack of trust, there may in fact be a dark side of trust in that it serves in the system justification process. There is of increasing importance to understand trust and the approaches in doing so have been vast—theory based, empirical, and behavior prediction. This timely volume makes an important contribution to the growing literature of trust, but many questions are left unanswered, such as what is the difference between institutional and personal trust and do institutions have motives? These questions as well as the many others posed within this volume will govern future social science discourse because of trust’s clear role in the effectiveness of legal and political systems.