TRUST AND UNCERTAINTY: THE EMOTIONAL BASIS OF RATIONALITY

1. TRUST AND UNCERTAINTY:THE EMOTIONAL BASIS OF RATIONALITY Jack Barbalet Sociology University of Leicester

2. Trust and Uncertainty • What is trust? • Risk or uncertainty • The basis of trust • Trust as an emotion • Trust and social capital • Trust and rationality

3. What is Trust? • Not control but dependency – acceptance of dependence on another • In the absence of pertinent knowledge • Bridges present and future – anticipates a future outcome it creates

4. What is Trust? • Trustworthiness of the other not an efficacious condition of trust • Trust necessarily faces risk and uncertainty • Fundamental uncertainty – ‘information about future events cannot be known at the moment of decision … and cannot be inferred’

5. Risk or uncertainty • Sociological literature – modernity and risk • Economics literature – calculability of risk

6. Risk or uncertainty • Trust in markets overcomes friction of transaction costs • Efficient lubricant as implicit contract • Fundamental uncertainty →calculable risk

7. Risk or uncertainty • Statistical probability and gambling • Invariant existing system with set rules • Real world – inherent uncertainty of unknowable futures • Keynes – paradigm of risk: whistling in the dark

8. The basis of trust • Forced option – no possibility of not choosing • Either A trusts B to achieve C, or A cannot have C • Emotional nature of trust

9. Trust as an emotion • Not all emotions are labile and disruptive, but may be calm and organizing • May not be conscious of (back-grounded) emotions as emotions • Emotions may underscore values, interests and meanings – rational

10. Trust as an emotion • Trust as feelings of positive expectation and safe dependency • Trust is a feeling of confidence in another’s future actions and also … • … confidence concerning one’s own judgement of another

11. Trust and social capital • Social capital a public never a private good • Social capital a ‘moral resource’ – increases with use, diminishes with disuse • Trust as a form of social capital?

12. Trust and social capital • Trust is non-transitive • Transitivity: if A trusts B, and B trusts C, then A will trust C. • But … B’s trusting C may lead A to re-evaluate whether B should be trusted

13. Trust and rationality • Trust is based on expectation not calculation • …yet it is nonetheless rational to trust trust • Distinguish between formal and substantive rationality