Trust and adaptive rationality : towards a new paradigm in trust research

Abstract

Combining economic, social-psychological and sociological approaches trust, this book provides a general theoretical framework to explain conditional and unconditional trust; it also presents an experimental test of the corresponding integrative model and its predictions. Broadly, it aims at advancing a ‘cognitive turn’ in trust research by highlighting the importance of (1) an actor´s context-dependent definition of the situation and (2) the flexible and dynamic degree of rationality involved in the phenomenon. In essence, trust is as “multi-faceted” as there are cognitive routes that take us to the choice of a trusting act. Therefore, adaptive rationality has to be incorporated as an independent and orthogonal dimension to the typological space of trust. Going from description to prediction, the work develops an analytically precise and tractable model of trust and adaptive rationality. The empirical test presented combines trust games, high- and low-incentive conditions, framing manipulations, and psychometric measurements; it is complemented by decision-time analyses