Trust and Trustworthiness

To address the multi-facet nature of trust, TRUEDEM distinguishes between trust as a quality of the individual and trustworthiness as a feature of dyadic relationships. The research focuses on ‘trustworthiness’, defined as an informal social contract where principals authorize agents to act on their behalf in the expectation that the agent will fulfil their responsibilities with competency, integrity and impartiality despite conditions of risk and uncertainty. This conceptualization emphasizes that trustworthiness is not about you or me – it is about us. Trust delegates actions both to agents (individuals) as well as to agencies (institutions). 

Understood in this way, for agents, trust is always beneficial. For governments in any type of regime, it encourages citizen’s compliance, like voting in elections, paying taxes, following healthcare guidelines, and obeying the law voluntarily, and it legitimates the decisions and actions of political authorities. For principals, however, like ordinary citizens, a broader perspective recognizes that in fact trustworthiness has two faces, not one. In Europe, blind trust in anti-vax posts weaken herd immunity, putting lives at risk. In Russia, trust in Putin lends credibility to lies that the Ukrainian invasion was designed to attack Nazis. A few moments reflection quickly highlights that trust, often assumed to be universally positive, also has a dark side. If public judgements of trustworthiness fail to reflect the actual competency, integrity and impartiality of the authorities, then it can prove risky and misplaced.

Like many other complex and hazardous decisions, making informed and accurate judgments about trustworthiness is a challenging process. TRUEDEM aims to unpack mediating conditions which can help to understand the intervening steps and the causal chain within the ‘black box’ model of trustworthiness assessment more fully. Operationalized through a repeating cycle of trustworthiness assessment, trust-building can be described as a complex process of matching new evidence (such as new laws adopted by the parliament, new policy measures introduced by the government, specific messages distributed by political leaders) against a set of good governance criteria, mediated by a system of individual-level characteristics and factors of social, political, and cultural environment.