Social Trust and Confidence: A Dual Mode Model of Cooperation in Risk Management

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We trust others to gain the benefits of cooperation. In the businessworld, trust supports interfirm alliances, acceptance of organizationalchange, the transfer of knowledge, and more. In public life, trustunderlies voting for candidates and support for government initiatives. In private life, trust guides relations among patients, physicians, andmedical organizations. Given this clear, pervasive importance of trustto our lives, it is not surprising that it has become the focus of agrowing body of research activity. The goal of our project is to test anew model of social trust within the applied context of environmentalrisk management. Our model differs from others by clearlydistinguishing social trust from confidence as separate, butinteracting, paths to cooperation. Social trust is based on judgmentsof values or intentions; confidence is based on judgments of pastperformance. Social trust is associated with uncertainty and risk; itis required when confidence fails. Confidence is the normal state ofaffairs, sometimes lost when performance is judged to be bad, butrestorable through the establishment of social trust. Social trust is abridge between steady states; it has primacy and control overconfidence. Our model has clear, practical implications for thepractice of risk management: attempts to communicate about performance(i.e., the management of risk) should be preceded by the establishmentof social trust relations. The state of trust relations conditions theinterpretation of performance information. In a state of distrust,presumably good performance information is discounted and does not leadto confidence. Similarly, in a state of trust, presumably badperformance information does not lead to the loss of confidence. Socialtrust, according to our model, is resilient, and helps us to remainconfident in the lives we lead; it can be progressive or conservative. Our research project will provide a test of this model of social trustand confidence in risk management, improving our understanding, movingus closer to the goal of using social trust to improve our lives.