We trust others to gain the benefits of cooperation. In the business world, trust supports interfirm alliances, acceptance of organizational change, the transfer of knowledge, and more. In public life, trust underlies voting for candidates and support for government initiatives. In private life, trust guides relations among patients, physicians, and medical organizations. Given this clear, pervasive importance of trust to our lives, it is not surprising that it has become the focus of a growing body of research activity. The goal of our project is to test a new model of social trust within the applied context of environmental risk management. Our model differs from others by clearly distinguishing social trust from confidence as separate, but interacting, paths to cooperation. Social trust is based on judgments of values or intentions; confidence is based on judgments of past performance. Social trust is associated with uncertainty and risk; it is required when confidence fails. Confidence is the normal state of affairs, sometimes lost when performance is judged to be bad, but restorable through the establishment of social trust. Social trust is a bridge between steady states; it has primacy and control over confidence. Our model has clear, practical implications for the practice of risk management: attempts to communicate about performance (i.e., the management of risk) should be preceded by the establishment of social trust relations. The state of trust relations conditions the interpretation of performance information. In a state of distrust, presumably good performance information is discounted and does not lead to confidence. Similarly, in a state of trust, presumably bad performance information does not lead to the loss of confidence. Social trust, according to our model, is resilient, and helps us to remain confident in the lives we lead; it can be progressive or conservative. Our research project will provide a test of this model of social trust and confidence in risk management, improving our understanding, moving us closer to the goal of using social trust to improve our lives.
